Corporate Aesthetics

Artists in this category use aesthetics and strategies adopted from the sphere of marketing and advertising as artistic motifs. They thus lay bare the mechanisms that govern visual culture oriented to profit-making, popularity and accumulation. Artists such as DIS, Pamela Rosenkranz or Takeshi Murata find a space of simultaneous inspiration and dissent in the world of trendbooks, PowerPoint presentations and idealised stock photographs, which came to dominate the landscape of our media reality. Modernity and consumerism are their objects of ironic reflection on our aspirations to form coherent identities, which have to be designed, wrapped in a pack, advertised and sold like a product or a gadget.

It’s worth highlighting that the practices of artists representing corporate aesthetics coincided with the global financial crisis. Their emblematic strategy can also be understood in the context of accelerationism in philosophy, which argues that the acceleration of the capital leads to its ultimate self-destruction.

The world which emanates from this dystopian vision is a scenery from films such as Cosmopolis by David Cronenberg and Holy Motors by Leos Carax – a hypermodern city plunged in the chaos of speculation and well on its way to demise.