Posted on October 3, 2011
A new user pointed me to a site that used a great phrase that's somehow escaped my notice until now: Brandalism. It's defined as "the defacement of public buildings and spaces by corporate ads, logos, and other forms of branding (brand + vandalism)."
I suppose all advertising could be lumped into this concept, but it mostly means the branding of buildings, events and places with corporate or product names... such as damned near every sports venue in the US. Such purchase (and abuse) of "naming rights" forms completely spurious associations in the consumer mind and pollutes every event associated with them... and let's not even follow that into corporate-branded centers of research and education.
The ultimate form of brandalism might be the visually painful, landscape-wrecking use of cartoonitecture - those immense, oversized, toy-like, cartoonish buildings used in highway-side malls, designed to attract our flickering attention the way waving puppies attracts small children. Bad enough we have to look at temples of shopping lust as we drive... worse that it all looks like the place Mickey Mouse buys his suspenders.
Renegades need to work against both trends. They're one of the more corrosive and belittling aspects of consumerist culture, and they need to go.
—JKG
Brandalism & Cartoonitecture
A new user pointed me to a site that used a great phrase that's somehow escaped my notice until now: Brandalism. It's defined as "the defacement of public buildings and spaces by corporate ads, logos, and other forms of branding (brand + vandalism)."
I suppose all advertising could be lumped into this concept, but it mostly means the branding of buildings, events and places with corporate or product names... such as damned near every sports venue in the US. Such purchase (and abuse) of "naming rights" forms completely spurious associations in the consumer mind and pollutes every event associated with them... and let's not even follow that into corporate-branded centers of research and education.
The ultimate form of brandalism might be the visually painful, landscape-wrecking use of cartoonitecture - those immense, oversized, toy-like, cartoonish buildings used in highway-side malls, designed to attract our flickering attention the way waving puppies attracts small children. Bad enough we have to look at temples of shopping lust as we drive... worse that it all looks like the place Mickey Mouse buys his suspenders.
Renegades need to work against both trends. They're one of the more corrosive and belittling aspects of consumerist culture, and they need to go.
—JKG