Hasta La Creative!

Chicago artist Pamela Michelle Johnson likes to paint still lifes of food items on large canvases.

From her artist statement:

In the American Still-Life series, Johnson takes on another fixture of contemporary American life, and does so with no apologies. When confronted with a six-foot tall canvas of enormous and precariously balanced hamburgers, waffles, doughnuts, or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches the viewer is forced to recognize that the work is about more than alluring junk food. Johnson’s fascination with the phenomena of mass-produced foods comes from viewing those artifacts of our culture as indicative of the state of the culture as a whole. Her goal is to invoke reflection on embracing a culture of complete and instant gratification while ignoring the consequences of our indulgences.

I totally hear all that and can’t quibble. But as a fan of Pop-Tarts, PB&Js, waffles and the rest, I also see her work as in a lighter context. In fact, if I was a brand manager on Pop-Tarts, I’d be tempted to misappropriate the meaning behind the work for my own purposes (or at least buy the original work and hang it in Kellogg’s offices). I mean, Johnson makes the product look good. Does she not?

[via Bad Banana]

According to The Wall Street Journal, Heng Yuan Xiang Group, a top Chinese wool producer, wanted to celebrate its sponsorship of this summer’s Beijing Olympics. So the wool company began running a 60-second ad in February, during the celebration of Lunar New Year, China’s biggest holiday.

When the Chinese public first saw the ad, some people thought their TV sets were broken. Viewers savaged the commercial in print media and online, some calling it intolerable or singling it out as the worst spot they had ever seen.

The backlash suggests that increasingly sophisticated Chinese consumers are rejecting low-budget, low-quality marketing.

The arrival of foreign ad agencies in the 1990s, together with the rapid expansion of the nation’s middle class, altered Chinese consumers’ expectations, the Journal surmises.