MURKETING

Q&A: Rosemary Williams, Behind The Wall of Mall

A couple of weeks ago I journeyed out to the Dumbo Arts Center to see an exhibition called Point of Purchase. One of the pieces on view there was a big wall of shopping bags, called The Wall of Mall, by an artist named Rosemary Williams. I was interested to learn that there was also a podcast associated with this piece. I signed up for that, and checked out some of Williams’ earlier projects at her site. A lot of her work is right up my alley — projects like Bodega Booty (a “recreation of a New York City bodega” functioning partly as “a love poem” to such stores), and CEO Views, in which we get to look out the windows of some powerful New Yorkers, and hear them talk about their vantage-points, in every sense of the term.

I decided to see if Williams would be willing to answer a few questions, and I’m pleased to say she was. A former New Yorker, these days she’s living (and teaching and making art) in Minnesota, not so far from the Mall of America, which turns out to be quite relevant to her podcast, “Rosemary goes To the Mall.”

Let’s start with the obvious questions. “Rosemary Goes To The Mall” is sort of a spinoff of the Wall of Mall, “a giant sculpture made out of shopping bags from the Mall of America.” What were you hoping viewers of the Wall of Mall would take away from it?

The “Wall of Mall” is meant to be an overwhelming representation of the “brandedness” of our daily lives. I was trying to respond to the Mall of America as iconic architecture, but also as a place which embodies our society’s obsession with stuff, and the ever increasing involvement and identification with manufactured items, the way they imbue status and provide a kind of weird personal satisfaction. I’m not saying that when I was a kid we didn’t want all that stuff and now we do, but there has been a definite creep of national chains overtaking the local store, for better or for worse. On the one hand, this provides a kind of safety, because you know what you are going to get at Starbucks, or the Gap, and it lessens the amount of work one has to do to get a satisfactory coffee, pair of jeans, etc. On the other hand, there is a sameness that is creeping in, which is rarely countered. Read more

Design Star: Not Hateful Enough

The reason that none of you have been watching Design Star on HGTV is that it is, of course, not a good show. The reason that it’s not a good show was glaringly obviously last night, as the two finalists squared off in a thick fog of mutual respect and best wishes. When they wished each other good luck, they really seemed to mean it: Whoever loses will be ever so happy for the winner.

Who wants to watch that? Where’s the excitement? The episode ended with a group hug. Nobody watches reality TV competitions to see a group hug. Nobody.

I couldn’t care less about fashion designers, but there’s little question that Project Runway is more interesting to watch precisely because so many of the participants are hateful, and seem to hate each other — and each other’s mothers, for that matter. Maybe they don’t, maybe it’s all in the editing, but it all seems pretty mean-spirited, and that’s what counts.

Probably you already knew all that. But I’m wondering if there isn’t an opportunity for a reality show that simply cuts through all the clutter and simply about hatefulness. It could be called America’s Next Top Asshole, and the weekly “challenges” would involve being an awful human: Making a stranger cry, lying to a loved one, taking credit for someone else’s accomplishments, cheating, stealing, insulting, etc. The judges would, of course, be the most hateful people from reality-show history (Puck, Richard Hatch, Ashlee Simpson, etc.). The winner would get a bunch of endorsement contracts, a show on MSNBC, and, of course, braggin’ rights.

Anyway, after last night’s episode of Design Star crawled to its feel-good conclusion, E and I agreed that we would be more likely to hire David, but that Alice would probably have a better show. So for the record, I’m voting for Alice. She’s real sweet.

Gaming The System

In Consumed: Disaffected! An online anti-advergame as a form of “semiotic disobedience.”

Persuasive Games, based in Atlanta, is one of many companies that create online games. Sometimes it does this for name-brand clients, including Cold Stone Creamery and Chrysler. Earlier this year, however, Persuasive Games released a game about the copy-shop chain Kinko’s that was rather different. For starters, Kinko’s is not a client. And the game, called Disaffected!, is not a typical example of an “advergame.” In fact, it’s billed as an anti-advergame. As the company explains: “Disaffected! puts the player in the role of employees forced to service customers under the particular incompetences common to a Kinko’s store.” …

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site, by way of this no-registration-required link.

Additional links: Persuasive Games; Water Cooler Games blog; McDonald’s Video Game.

Politics of Second Life

I think my favorite Second Life writer is Pixeleen Mistral. Read her (I guess it’s her) amusing coverage of politician Mark Warner stumping in the virtual world here. Some excerpts:

Second Life avatar Mark Warner today shocked the metaverse by disclosing his RL identity as Mark Warner — the former Governor of Virginia….

I tried to strike up a conversation with the Mark Warner avatar and got no response. I felt unsettled. A politician that won’t talk is like no politician I have ever seen. Could it be that this avatar was nothing more than an SL “action figure”? ….
More interesting than the interview itself was the scene backstage before the interview, where the Millions of Us handlers put the governor through his paces, practicing waves, helping him keep his feet on the ground and apparently adjusting the size of the avatar as well. He sure looked a lot taller once he was on stage, but maybe it was just the hardware lighting. Perhaps the best RL use of SL for politics going forward will be in producing inexpensive machinima-based political attack ads. This would help create a market for lifelike G.W. Bush and Hillary Clinton avatar costumes, with obvious benefits for SL content creators….

There’s more…

The Washington Post today has an “appreciation,” written by Paul Farhi, of Arthur Schiff, creator of 1800-plus infomercials or “long form” ads, and, evidently, creator of the phrase “But wait, there’s more!” Schiff died last week.

“But wait, there’s more!” was Schiff’s signature creation, his “Hamlet” and “Moby-Dick.” It eclipsed his other immortal catchphrases: “Isn’t that amazing?” “Now how much would you pay?” and “Act now and you’ll also receive . . . ” He wrote “Wait, there’s more” for a spot for Ginsu knives (a product Schiff himself named, supposedly in his sleep), which has become one of the best-known commercials ever, and surely one of the most parodied.

Ginsu, incidentally, is a nonsense, made-up word. My fondest memory of those ads is the announcer saying, “In Japan, the fooot can split wood” — here they showed a guy in a karate outfit kicking a board in half — “but it can’t split a watermelon!” And they’d show the guy kicking a watermelon. Hilarious.

Farhi describes a variation of this, with a hand chopping a board, but merely squashing a tomato. I remember, that, too, but I’m pretty sure they did this watermelon bit as well — or else I’ve somehow invented it along the way.