Mucha, So Confusing

Art by Bipasha Chakraborty

At the Art Gallery of NSW, ‘Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau’ exhibit,  there is marketing on the walls. Not in the Campbell's soup, art–is–anything–we–say–it–is kind of way; in sincere works that were originally intended, not for the walls of a museum, but for packaging and posters promoting biscuits, plays, and cigarettes too. Of all the women, the smoker ensnares my eye. Her lips part softly, teeth peek into the light, head twitched back, drooling smoke, hair curling like toes under nicotine-stained sheets.

The commercials certainly don’t lack affect. They aren’t dead — except maybe the Nestlé mural. There’s something about a tribute from a corporation to a monarch that’s undeniably dystopian, unintentionally parodic, the Queen flanked on her left by factories and right by colonial ships. Despite its size, it is much less popular than every other work. The only discourse I overhear is a man in Nike tech wondering 'who the two chicks next to the queen are.’ No one asks who all the other women are, lounging across countless other canvases.

My first thought walking out is, how much for a postcard? The souvenir shop is conveniently crammed between the exit and escalators, so I don’t have to venture far to find out. Beautiful prints on pillows, towels, bookmarks, postcards (only $2.99), posters, and an art book. Mucha seems timid about his work, “My art, if I may call it that...”  I understand his hesitancy. Even though it’s masterful, it’s easy to sum up. To say, “this is a cigarette ad”, in the same way I can say, “this is a pillow”, or “this is a bookmark”. But isn’t summing it up reductive? Art isn’t for anything, I don’t think. And we interact with a cigarette ad differently to an artwork; keeping a polite distance, like talking to a stranger. I teetered on the border of surrender, of engaging without reserve. I told myself, it was no longer ‘marketing’ since it was decontextualized. But, is an advertisement ever removed from context? I suppose I wasn’t in a store, but in a gallery; the posters couldn't hurt me from behind glass. 

The tour guide promoted Mucha as a democratic artist, said his posters brought art to the proletariat. I appreciated that narrative. A rebellion to get art out of institutions and into the home. A democratic space, snubbed from snobbery, primed for personal engagement. A friend of mine’s grandfather, an art collector, told me that before making a purchase he asks himself not if the work is beautiful, but whether he could live with it.

The postcard is blu–tacked to my wall right now. Maybe when someone’s over they will see it, sit with it, and it’ll become their art too, free of context.

***

I didn’t experience the rise of Charli xcx’s Brat firsthand, but I imagine those that did like Napoleonic troops, selves evaporating into an omniscience, content with the knowledge that history was being made. 

Charli’s burner Instagram @brat_360 was an ultimate transgression of the artist–audience power structure. She only let people follow in small batches at random times. Her most loyal fans were prithee to daily introspections, a DJ set, an impromptu street concert — recordings are available online, but stripped of their immediacy, their magic. Our second-hand consumption only amplifies the prestige of real engagement.

For us, the proletariat, she gifted the Brat Wall. A huge mural printed Brat Green. Through a slowly morphing ecology of letters, words, and teasers, she aroused hype to watch canvas, livestreaming the whole ordeal.

And of course there’s the album art. Provocation distilled precisely, I debated with a friend for half an hour after they said it lacked an aesthetic. Charli replaced the Crash cover, visceral, violent and sexy — in fact, all her album covers — with flat colours and low-res text. Homogenising her discography’s aesthetic. An artistic stroke, a political act; a marketing move.

The covers, account, meme generator, and concerts are artistic moments in and of themselves. It's like we are all backstage and in the audience; empowered with double–vision; enraptured by spectacle as disconnected observers, and yet intimately acquainted with her. Brat is a monolith to marvel at, and a culture to participate in. 

Reminiscing in a few years, I’ll say, ‘Brat was iconic’, and I won't be referring to a collection of audio files uploaded to Spotify, but to all of this… this is Brat. The artwork is ‘a world’ she ‘builds through persona’. The art doesn’t begin with ‘360’ and end with ‘365’. The spectacle is not subordinate to the record, they are equal citizens of a Brat world, populated not just with music, but marketing too.

Yet I can still sum it up, say, “this is marketing.” And it’s tempting, because the signature of effective marketing is subliminality. However this would not merely subordinate the marketing, but the artwork too, the two irrevocably intertwined. By negating the marketing’s value, we surrender the possibility of aesthetic engagement. What makes Brat great art is also what makes it effective marketing. And while we celebrate the former end, we are dubious at best of the latter. The collision of these two projects is a dissonance; I want to party freely, but critical thinking won’t allow me to surrender.

I am unwilling to retreat into a world where price tags are more essential to the conception of an artwork than its beauty.

A second coming of the author is due, for it is against an artist that we measure the aesthetic sincerity of a work. In the case of Brat however, Charli’s nuanced party-girl persona is the nucleus; the artist is an element of the artwork. She adopts a superposition simultaneously within the world, and beyond it. We might collapse this contradiction by identifying Party-Girl-Charli as persona, and Artist-Charli as the real Charli, the subject of sincerity we can turn to and judge. But this abstraction fails to grasp that our interaction with Charli is parasocial. Just as Party-Girl-Charli is constructed through concerts, raves, and music videos, Artist-Charli is constructed through interviews, podcasts, and tweets. It is deceptive not to grasp both Charlis as moments in a single Brat persona.

And even if we could dissolve the persona, Charli isn’t the only artist of Brat. She sets it into motion, but beyond her marketing team — who might still be considered extensions of her artistic will — fans of Brat have actualised it as distinct wills. We erected Brat Walls worldwide, a dance trend to ‘Apple’, and adopted an entire vernacular of Brat slang. Each of us create Brat, make it, do it on fait Brat.

Art seems also to possess a transcendent quality when its aesthetic value is superior enough to intrinsically subordinate its market value; when something is inexplicably beautiful we label it ‘priceless’. The historical influence of Mucha’s aesthetic and its technical excellence are seemingly enough to overshadow its use as advertisement, so we permit it into our galleries. 

But to make this judgement about Brat we must define the merits of its medium. Good music is moving, good books insightful, good paintings evocative. Reductive examples, but they serve for me to ask — since we have agreed that Brat is more than music — what merits must we judge it by?

***

What medium is my Mucha postcard? My purchase was not motivated by a desire for the purpose it would serve, but simply a desire to own it. The functional value -– as something to write on, stamp, mail to a friend — is negated by the value I attribute to having it. It became a commodity with a null function. I chose to use it as a decorative poster but could have used it as a bookmark, an origami sheet, or a symbol of my commitment to democratising art. The form suggests a purpose, but it doesn’t necessitate function.

And isn’t this what art pursues? Arbitrariness. A playground for minds to run free, to find pleasure in discovering how things might be, beyond how we immediately box them in, conceptualise them. And if consumption in consumer-culture is aesthetic not functional, could marketing be an artistic innovation? One born from economics but not tethered to it. A medium with social-life itself as its canvas.

The enterprise of marketing itself is a signifier; I can't help but associate it with manipulation and predation. These normative properties alter not just how I perceive marketing abstractly, but how I consume real instances of it, whether artistic or capitalistic. Concepts are aesthetic categorisations. Relations between concepts influence our engagements with Mucha, with Brat, with all art, especially music, where marketing is emergently pervasive. 

And although the categories of ‘good’ or ‘marketing’ might be aesthetic, our interactions with them are anything but. We might understand these things through manufactured concepts, but our relations in the world are not arbitrary nor playful. It doesn't matter if you conceive of them as dangerous while I conceive of them as sexy — cigarettes cause cancer all the same. No matter if these concepts are solidified through introspection, reasoning, or seductive marketing.

Art is at the club and in our homes, the eternal written into our world like Jesus Christ on a plastic sign – a contingently sinister thought. Maybe Charli is right; Everything is romantic.