ART ♥ MERCH
ART ♥ MERCH
WORDS BY PATRICK MCGRAW
OUT NOW
ISSUE 43 FW23
KALEIDOSCOPE's Fall/Winter 2023 issue launches with a set of six covers. Featuring Sampha, Alex Katz, Harmony Korine, a report into the metamorphosis of denim, a photo reportage by Dexter Navy, and a limited-edition cover by Isa Genzken.
Also featured in this issue: London-based band Bar Italia (photography by Jessica Madavo and interview by Conor McTernan), the archives of Hysteric Glamour (photography by Lorenzo Dalbosco and interview by Akio Kunisawa), Japanese underground illustrator Yoshitaka Amano (words by Alex Shulan), Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (photography by Nicolas Poillot and interview by Daria Miricola), a survey about Japan’s new hip-hop scene starring Tohji (photography by Taito Itateyama and words by Ashley Ogawa Clarke), Richard Prince’s new book “The Entertainers” (words by Brad Phillips), “New Art: London” (featuring Adam Farah-Saad, Lenard Giller, Charlie Osborne, R.I.P. Germain, and Olukemi Ljiadu photographed by Bolade Banjo and interviewed by Ben Broome).
FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE
ESCAPE TO MIAMI
The most southernly city in the US, Miami exists in the tropical recesses of the American imagination: land of celebrity, thunderstorms, Tony Montana, and Art Deco architecture. Here, we meet the latest generation of Miamians—committed radicals in the fields of art, fashion, and music, who are dreaming up new narratives for the city they call home.
NEW ART: LONDON
The art world’s compulsion to categorize by the yardstick of “hot or not” has historically been the driving force behind the market and the gallery system. Commerce is intertwined with this metric, spurred on by the insatiable appetite to find talented young things to build up. This system is uninteresting: what’s in vogue rarely reflects those operating at the cutting edge. Who are those young emerging artists making work against all odds—work that is difficult and costly to make, store, exhibit, move, and sell? These five individuals typify this path. Working across video, sound, installation, and sculpture, they march onwards, carving out their own niche—exhibiting in empty shop spaces one day and major institutions the next. For them, making is guided by urgency, and persistence is motivated by blind faith.
SARA SADIK
KALEIDOSCOPE hosted a solo exhibition by Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (b. 1994, Bordeaux), in November 2023 at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan, with the support of Slam Jam. Inspired by videogames, anime, science fiction, and French rap, Sara Sadik’s work explores the reality and fantasies of France’s Maghrebi youth, addressing issues of adolescence, masculinity, and social mythologies. Her work across video, performance, and installation often centers on male characters, using computer-generated scenarios to transform their condition of marginalization into something optimistic and poetic.
FROM THE SHOP
FROM THE ARCHIVE
MANIFESTO
In 2023, from June 22 to June 24 during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, KALEIDOSCOPE and GOAT presented the new edition of our annual arts and culture festival, MANIFESTO. Against the unique setting of the French Communist Party building, a modern architectural landmark designed by legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the festival will bring together visionary creators from different areas of culture across three days of art, fashion and sound. The 2024 edition will run from June 21 to June 23.
CAPSULE PLAZA
In April 2023, a year after the launch of the magazine, Capsule introduced Capsule Plaza, a new initiative that infuses new energy into Milan Design Week by redefining the design showcase format. A hybrid between a fair and a collective exhibition, Capsule Plaza brings together designers and companies from various creative fields, bridging industry and culture with a bold curation that spans interiors and architecture, beauty and technology, ecology and craft. The 2024 edition will run from April 15 to April 21.
The rise of museum and art gallery merchandise is unstoppable—the cumulative point of an economic and creative process that started with Pop Art. And as museum-going turns into a signifier of one’s inclusion in a global creative class compensating financial precariousness with good taste, the rule is simple: If you can’t buy the painting, why not get the T-shirt?
The rise of museum and art gallery merchandise over the past decade has been ubiquitous. Walking though any metropolitan area, you’re sure to see a wealth of Met Museum tote bags, New Museum T-shirts, and MoMA x Yankees hats, worn by all types of people. They’re all representations of the glut of licensing deals in which nearly all major art museums and galleries have begun partaking in the past couple of decades. It’s a shift that has changed the nature of the artworks, the merchandise, and the programming of museums themselves. Art has now bred fully with design and disseminated into culture as a whole. While everyone may not be an artist as Joseph Beuys predicted, everyone is, at the very least, artistic.
This doesn't spring from any humanistic or socialist idea about the freeing or horizontal powers of art, but from economics.
Damien Hirst, Pharmaceutical pills charm bracelet with "Thirst" monogram, edition of 50, 2004.
Museums have struggled for years to find a stable economic footing amid their less prestigious role in society, a disinterested public, and a digitizing economy. In response to this, museums have changed the defifinition of what a museum is, making them fifirmly part of the experience economy. Museums are no longer simply collections of artworks, but experiences like theme parks, where purchasing merchandise that you view as a representation or outgrowth of your own personality is part of the experience. This in turn means that, for future generations, the MoMA will be more associated with a baseball hat, and the Met with a tote bag, than with the identity of a contemporary art museum.
The historical period of art world merchandising, which lasted until the 1960s, was defined by souvenirs: literal recreations of paintings or drawings, and, going back further, parts of the building that museum-goers chipped off as a keepsake—objects that were direct descendants of the relics that were collected during religious pilgrimages, when worshipers would carry handfuls of dirt back to Europe from the Holy Land. It wasn’t until the 1950s and 60s that the shift was made to merchandise, i.e., something that is used as a promotional tool, when museums began selling T-shirts, hats, and posters. But these were mostly throw away items that still functioned more as forget-me-nots than as truly promotional merchandise.
Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin ceramic sculpture, edition of 150, 1992.
Pop Art and its nature as a direct descendant of advertising and popular culture changed the nature of art world merchandise. In 1962, Claes Oldenburg opened The Store in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a storefront where the artist sold his work to the general public, immediately challenging the role of the gallery as mediator and questioning the line between a work of art and a commodity, as well as the role of the artist themselves.
Drawing a through-line from Oldenburg’s store, Keith Haringopened his Pop Shop in1986 at 232 Lafayette Street in New York. The store sold hoodies, buttons, T-shirts, and other knick-knacks that were made with Haring’s designs, affordably priced and marketed to the general public. Eventually, other artists, such as Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, began selling work at Haring’s store. Haring’s intentions weren’t simply to make art but also to make it available to the masses. When asked, he explicitly said that the reason he opened the shop was to make his work available to people of lesser economic means and from “boroughs other than Manhattan.” The difference between Keith Haring’s Pop Shop and Oldenburg’s The Store was the scale and intention of merchandise that Haring was selling. Haring was mass-producing works at scale, at a price that was intended to be affordable to anyone, and creating what could truly be referred to as merchandise, and not just works of art.
Urs Fischer’s UF pop-up shop, at Jeffrey Deitch, New York, 2022.
Haring's Pop Shop and Pop Art in general emboldened the idea of the artist as a brand, something that museums used to bolster attendance, which, in the late 80s, was still increasing. It wasn’t until after 1992 that attendance started the plummet for art museums worldwide, a shift that corresponded directly to the end of Pop Art’s tendrils and the beginning of social issue–informed programming, such as the infamous “Magicians de la Terre” show. In 2012, the year that saw the lowest-recorded museum attendance record, museums began to see that the solution was to market art as a part of mass culture, to create a new cultural class who would buy merchandise as representations of their personality.
MoMA’s adjustable baseball NY Yankees Hat.
The trend towards merchandising has been brought about by a rise in licensing deals. Though there still isn’t much raw data on the licensing deals that museums and galleries have procured, a handful of companies such as Artistory and AndArt Agency have cropped up to help keep track of the trends. All types of museums and galleries, from the Met and the Pompidou to David Zwirner, have all signed licensing deals in the past few years to be able to create merchandise from their collections, in an effort to tap into the global brand licensing market that was valued at over $275 billion dollars in 2022 and is expected to reach $385 billion by 2027. Licensing is the mechanism that allows MoMA to, for instance, create a skateboard out of a Faith Ring- gold painting. But, it’s not just art that museums are licensing; many museums have done collaborations with brands, such as the collabs between the Louvre and AirBnB, the American Museum of Natural History and Etsy, collapsing previously held notions of sacredness amongst art and museums.
Pope.L x Supreme Fall 2022, training crawl skateboard deck, multicolor.
The rise in licensing has also changed the nature of the work on show. Museum-going, like much of life, has switched to being experiential, and the work that is exhibited lends itself to being printed on a T-shirt, like a Barbara Kruger shirt or Basquiat painting. Museum-going formerly was seen both as a way to have a revelatory experience with a work of art and as something of a civic duty. Now, many people go to museums to signal themselves as cultured, and to see something like a collection of Tim Burton’s props and buy a matching T-shirt. By making museum-going more akin to movie-or concert-going, museums opened themselves up to lucrative licensing deals, and also boosted attendance by making people feel as though they were able to participate with the artist by buying merchandise.
Neue Nationalgalerie x Highsnobiety – BERLIN 3 T-Shirt Off-White.
The experiential nature of museums and the licensing deals have in fact blended together to turn museums and their stores into experiences themselves. Examples of this include Chila Kumari Singh Burman, who opened up a pop-up shop of neon works for sale at the Tate, or the Victoria and Albert Museum’s “Grand Time Hotel,” a pop-up shop in the museum’s Shanghai location that was designed as a lounge to take selfies in while you’re shopping. And gift shops are no longer simply gift shops, but rather just shops themselves. MoMA has over six separate stores, and they recently announced that Nordstrom would sell their products across the US. Meanwhile, Perrotin, Gagosian, and Hauser & Wirth all have stand-alone stores, separate from their gallery spaces.
Keith Haring at the Pop Shop at 292 Lafayette Street in the Soho neighborhood of Manhattan, New York (1986).
Artists are, of course, continuing to produce their own merch, following the likes of Jeff Koons and Keith Haring. Daniel Arsham and KAWS have created merchandise that begs the question of where the line between a work of art and a piece of merchandise is. This mixing of merchandise and art has decreased the distinctions and cluttered the ideas of art and design, a necessary change in order to produce works of design en masse.
This spread of merchandising and the shifting nature of museums has led to an expanded market for that merchandise, i.e., the rise of the “creative class”: otherwise unartistic people who assume vaguely artistic niche interests as a way to posit themselves culturally. The art world was once something that positioned itself in an at least imagined opposition to mainstream cultural sensibilities, through its championing of highbrow art and the patrons and hierarchical structures that made it possible. But it now caters to everyone (divisibility equals profifitability), killing off any idea of high-or lowbrow that people may have ascribed to. When the creative class visits New York, they go to the High Line and the Whitney instead of Times Square, buying the tote to match. And for those native New Yorkers, a third of which are defined as freelancers, being a member of the creative class is a way of obfuscating your economic precarity by rebranding it as “creative freedom.”
Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog, limited edition of 999 with a unique number engraved under the foot of the dog.
Celebrities as well have begun signaling their association to the art world, something that many of them have bought into as a stable asset market. Whether it’s Leo DiCaprio flaunting his investments in the market or Jay-Z and Beyoncé wearing Noah Davis shirts, celebrities have all sought to be seen as creative, a distinguishing factor for a crowd perceived as vapid as celebrities. At the heart of the issue, for both the new creative class and celebrities, you must signal that you are interested and a member because you can no longer just belong to a class or be interested in these things—now you must now broadcast it.
What difference is there between someone wearing a Marvel movie shirt and someone in a Kusama shirt? In this sense, the medium is the message in a culture whose main form of production is signaling, specifically signaling our pet niches and the perceived differences between those niches (which are often imagined). Without a central cultural center around which we all orbit, you’re either signaling your allegiance to your selected cultural niche or your opposition to it. But this has just diluted any meaning and art into an easily accessible and designable terminology whose main intended expression is on a tote bag. At this point, the tendency is beyond simple commodifification; it’s an urge on the part of the buyer to express themselves to other people, one that before was simply hidden or not possible by technical means. It’s an urge that blends commodity fully with personality, one that will inevitably lead to a world completely overrun with design.
1. Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 1993
2. Matthew Barney, “The Cremaster Cycle,” Guggenheim Museum, 2002
3. Roy Lichtenstein “Inside/Outside,” Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, 2001
4. Barbara Kruger, “Barbara Kruger,” Whitney Museum of American Art, 2000
5. Takashi Murakami, “In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow,” Gagosian Gallery, 2014 Photography by Takeshi Matsumi