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Oneify?

It seems the barriers between art and design have always been strained. One could argue Michaelangelo was basically doing graphic design work for the church when they financed his ceiling painting in the Sistine Chapel. Luckily, nowadays the art world at least seems to try to seperate itself from the world of commerce. The disitinction in the motive for making between art and graphic design is critical. As Bertolt Brecht put it, the more art aligns itself with commerce, the less art is able to take a critical voice.

Most people know when they are looking at a designed corporate campaign and when they are looking at an art object. People don't look to ad campaigns to fill the need that art fills and convey the meanings that art conveys. But advertising would love to try. As advertising gets more deperate to 'break through the clutter' we've see an increase in saturation as well as advertising's attempt to ease its way into different aspects of our culture - through sponsorship, naming, whisper campaigns and so on. Big business has begun to sponsor art exhibitions, companies like Altoids/Phillip Morris, Mercedes Benz, banks, etc., love to get their names on museum walls for the publicity, good will, and tax incentives.

Enter the latest attempt to crowbar business into the art world and youth culture:Oneify.

This campaign offers a manipulative blend of potentially good things like skate and art subcultures, distinctive graphics, and unity messages, with total crap things like Pepsi, chemical sweetners, marketing, and co-option.

Some quick background... the designer, Geoff McFetridge, is part of the Beautiful Losers art exhibit which features (relatively) big name skate/street artists and is currently travelling around the nation. The show has been criticized for several things already (all the artists are fairly successful making the 'losers' name a little ironic, it is sponsored by Nike, most of the 50 artists are men, and the two women are wives or girlfirends of men in the show, etc.). Additionally problematic are the roles of graphic designers like McFetridge and Shepherd Fairey in the show. Both run major design firms. Mcfetridge's Champion Graphics designed the opening titles for the Virgin Suicides, and created work for Hewlett Packard and the X games. Fairey, famous for his OBEY/Andre the Giant street campaign, owns the firm BLKMRKT, and has done work for Addidas, Timex, Ogilvy & Mather, Sony, Levis, and various major record labels and movie studios. My point is, these aren't the most credible guys overflowing with pure artistic integrity. And I'm not just standing on my punk-rock soapbox calling 'sell out' either. But, while working within this 'scene', these two have proven themselves to be first in line, pens in hand, ready to sign over their part of skate/graffiti art culture to whoever is writing a check.

Back to Oneify. McFetridge has now made a complete campaign for PepsiOne. We're seeing billboards of this stuff up in San Francisco and there are collectible trading cards for example. The about link includes an 'artist' section that dewlls on McFeteridge's artistic background while glossing over his design career. It also includes a 'onifesto' which promotes simplistic messages of unity like 'oneness is your friend.' Of course messages about the drink are completely integrated throughout. What could be simple, beautiful messages about getting along are hijacked by a ploy to sell PepsiOne.

In a NYT interview, an adman from the campaign didn't hide behind the facade of Pepsi as patron of the arts, "Kids are so smart, they’ll call you out on overt marketing in a minute, so telling them a ‘one-calorie, great taste’ story is so ho-hum to them. If you engage them in unorthodox ways, with a bit of grace, charm, whimsy, fun and discovery,” he added, “you can actually ask them to buy something."

Update: See also My Pepsi Hallucination