Adverse effects of commercialized art

My first conscious encounter with the commercialization of art occurred last summer when I was doing endless amounts of shopping in preparation for my freshman year of college. While I was familiar with the word ‘commercialization’ and knew about the concept for quite some time, I had never really given much thought to what it meant. For so long, I accepted commercialization for what it was and even bought into the ubiquitous and unavoidable phenomenon. But as I was walking through the aisles of Bed Bath & Beyond and landed in what they call the Home Décor section, it dawned on me how destructive commercialization actually is. What sparked this revelation was an encounter with stacks upon stacks of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe diptych. There were an array of colors, sizes, and assortments, and it seemed that half of the floor had been consumed by these despoiled pieces of art. Then, a girl and her mother strolled by with pink college gear in tow, and the girl picked up one of the canvases and dropped it in her cart. Her mother said, “Sarah, do you even know who painted these?” And Sarah replied, “No, Ma. But it’s cute and the colors match my bedding!” This was my breaking point. I watched this girl pick up one of Andy Warhol’s mass-produced paintings and she didn’t even care about who painted the original. Apparently, all that mattered was that it was cute and that the color schemes were coordinated. Damn, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she didn’t know that Marilyn Monroe was the woman in the picture.

Well, I guess that’s capitalism for you – everything is turned into objects and reproduced for the purpose of generating profit. You can see it everywhere. Images are screened onto things ranging from t-shirts and mugs to birthday cakes. And with my first example, pieces of art are mass-produced, sold in Bed Bath & Beyond, and marketed towards teenage girls for the purpose of hanging them in their college dorm rooms. Sorry folks, but commercialization is inescapable.

What saddened me so much was that this girl didn’t pick up the Warhol piece because she loves Andy Warhol’s pop art-style or because she collects every variation to that diptych there is. She picked it up because of something called image reproduction. Left and right, images are being reproduced to the point where they lack their original meaning. Consequently, art is now being tailored to meet a particular style in the efforts to appeal to a specific commercial market. In summation, art is now a commodity and more often than not, no longer the expression of the artist’s fundamental ideas.

Here is a link to one of Bed Bath & Beyond’s commercialized Andy Warhol’s:

http://www.bedbathandbeyond.com/product.asp?order_num=-1&SKU=16064700

P.S. That’s $30?!?