(above) Sneak peek at the early stages of a new project I'm currently working on. With Black Friday rapidly descending upon us, the timing seems auspicious to share a little part of it. The series is influenced by the tragic death of Jdimytai Damour, the Wal-Mart employee who was trampled to death by a stampede of Black Friday shoppers in 2008. More details and images coming soon, as the project evolves and finishes.Overall, the larger topic of consumer culture is becoming one of increasing focus for my work.
Other artists who've also tackled the theme:
Lily, 5, shops at Rachel London's Garden, where Britney Spears has some of her clothes designed.© Lauren Greenfield
from the series Retail (Copia)© Brian Ulrich
Black Friday is the perfect impetus to pause and reflect on the contrasting narratives of citizenry vs. consumerism. My Black Friday gift (a little food for thought to digest with the Thanksgiving stuffing and pie) comes from the political theorist Benjamin Barber, writing on the topic in this piece from World Affairs Journal:
"Productivist capitalism, molded by a Protestant ethos conducive to work, investment, deferred gratification, and service, has long since given way to consumerist capitalism, defined by an ethos of infantilization conducive to laxity, impetuousness, narcissism, and consumption. Where once Americans worked harder than almost any other people, today pop commentators such as Thomas Friedman can worry about the 'quiet crisis' in which the tendency to 'extol consumption over hard work, investment and long-term thinking' creates an America whose vaunted productivity is in decline and where kids 'get fat, dumb, and lazy', squandering the very moral capital the Protestant culture once promoted and sustained. Tellingly, President Bush after 9/11 did not invite Americans to sacrifice or work harder in order to defeat terrorism; he invited them to go shopping."
