This crystallization was already turning 10 Corso Como—as well as its founder—into a center of thinking with many points of entry and with far higher stakes than the exclusive packaging of a store: it was a problem area, a site where questions were raised, doubling the reality of the sale of objects.
The last great revolution that 10 Corso Como imposes upon our experience of things relates to the nature of the brand. From a strictly material point of view, the origins of branding coincide with those of human culture: the use of signs, of strokes, of marks made to define the symbolic separation of property and the ranking of personal objects is an archaic practice, for it is the specific form of that sociability to which human beings attribute their origin. Thus the relation of reciprocal implication between the brand and commerce is not an exclusive attribute of capitalist economy: on the contrary, it is a much older phenomenon than we might be led to believe.
In criticizing the traditional position of economic history, according to which primitive commodities are represented by natural, unworked products such as wheat, cotton, and potatoes, which can be replaced by an equivalent of any kind, anthropologists have demonstrated that the introduction of marks is the first condition for the structuring of a complex market, different from the primitive model of the bazaar.8 In an unstructured market (the bazaar), everything is uncertain: the true nature of the object put up for sale and its “biography” (provenance, history, mode of production, quality) are neither evident nor legible on the skin and surface of the commodity; hence the relation with the object and all the information pertaining to it must be mediated by the seller. The introduction of brand names and of trademarks permits in the first place to correct and balance “the asymmetry of information between buyer and the seller” and to build a sort of shared cognitive map with the help of which the origin of the commodity can be traced and its quality foreseen. In this way it is not only that “efficient channels of communication between producers and consumers” are produced “which are independent of the chain of intermediary traders and middlemen,”9 but also that the nature of market competition changes, evolving “from the relationship between buyer and seller to the relationship between sellers.”10 It is still the symbolic marking or branding of commodities that transforms the market into a “public” space where the secret becomes impossible, in opposition
to the excessive secretiveness of the bazar which both grows out of and is seeded with suspicion. Where the bazar trader is obsessed with secrecy and with protecting business information on his sources of supply the size of his inventory and of his clientele, the standardized commodity trader advertises his comprehensive range of stock, the producers from whom he purchases, and the size of his clientele.11
Confirming and radicalizing Faselow’s intuitions, David Wengrow has shown not only that the use of branding existed in Mesopotamian civilization, but that the use of standardized sealed packaging gave rise to an economy in which commodity and labor could easily replace each other.12 The brand is what allows an object to be turned into a commodity; in this sense, it hosts the attempt to resolve “a paradox common to ancient and modern economies of scale: the reincorporation of homogenous goods into a world of complex personal relationships”13 or, better, “the realities of living in a community of individual actors formed and sustained through the circulation of impersonal objects.”14
The origin of brands, as we know them today, is to be found at the end of the nineteenth century, but it was especially from the 1950s on that they acquired the importance we are in the habit of giving them today.15 In contrast to common belief, a brand will completely restructure its own market when consumption stops being exclusively defined by the desire to display or confirm one’s social superiority or status (according the logic of Veblen’s conspicuous consumption), or on the other hand by the will to mimic that of the upper classes, in bovarist manner (this would be Gabriel Tarde’s social mimetism). It is only when consumption ceases to be defined by socially determined variants that it becomes necessary to associate a product with an array of extremely complex meanings, values, and emotions, of which the brand is at once the seal and the ultimate signifier.16 Precisely because the relation that prompts individuals to produce, to acquire, and to use objects, especially certain objects and not others, is much more complex and profound,17 the symbolic mark through which the object is given to be known and recognized not only acquires more importance, but must carry much more information than it had before. For this very reason, from this moment on, the brand will not limit itself to structuring the market and making possible a more balanced flow of information between buyer and seller. Above all, it will have to carry the object and to incorporate in it a much greater amount of significance and meaning than it had in the past. The brand is no longer “the label employed to differentiate the various manufacturers of a product,” but becomes “a complex symbol that represents a variety of ideas and attributes.”18 It is through this sensitive symbol that things speak. It is through this self-image that every piece of merchandise coincides with a “public image.”19
Observed on a global scale (and not on a single product), branding is a classification of the objects of this world, or of groups of objects, which operates not through purely logical or social categories but through sensible, nonmimetic, and not purely linguistic signs. Once these have been affixed to the things they signify, they allow each thing not only to distinguish itself from the rest of the objects produced and exchanged but also to convey a potentially infinite and extremely complex series of socially shared meanings. It is not enough to produce, distribute, buy, or sell things; it is necessary to support the commodities with symbols, to organize them, to parcel up the reality of objects and producers with the help of these symbols, to set up the sensible appearance of the world by means of these visible signs. If this series of symbols allows us to arrange the objects and, derivatively on them, also the persons who produce and those who acquire them, this order has nothing divine and nothing natural either: it is contingent and mobile and must favor the mobility and contingency of things, their circulation—in other words the sum of those effects that we label “commercial.” By presupposing an activity of branding, then, the market reveals itself to be a form of primitive aesthetic arrangement, a kind of first cosmic categorization that permits on the one hand the socialization of the world of things (these can pass from hand to hand and are not tied to a single subject) and, on the other, the liberation of things, which are then capable of circulating without having to be mediated by a subject-person in order to establish themselves qua recognizable, appropriable, and usable. The brand is what allows things to be known through themselves.
Branding tells us that every market is a cosmological fact even before being a social fact. On the one hand, the market is not a reality that follows the composition of the world and of society: rather it enables a society to construct a world qua moving reality, produced, and not just given to us in order that we contemplate and know it (the market, too, is in some way presupposed, so that things may be produced and desired). The array of categories that accompany the structuring of the social body is of an aesthetic rather than a logical nature. It is not only a name but also a logo, a perceptible reality; it is not a pure logical or semiotic reality, but a nonanalogous image added to the thing. Through branding, then, every society redoubles the world aesthetically—but not logically or linguistically—in order to transform it into a set of things that can be passed from hand to hand; it is no longer a pure object of contemplation. If socialization foresees and implies a logical arrangement of the real, commercial release anticipates and involves an aesthetic display, an aesthetic construction of the world and its objects, their duplication and perceptible distribution.
The coincidence between art and the marketplace that seals the brand is important for at least two other reasons. First, it allows us to extend the very idea of an aesthetic dimension of things; and what represents it is no longer the sphere
in which they are objects of contemplation, but the condition of possibility of their circulation. Second, here the symbol displays a different status from the one we usually confer upon it. A brand is an incomplete symbol because it cannot signify on its own; in every instance it has to be affixed to the thing itself in order to signify something and hence be able to complete its own meaning. On the other hand, it represents a new relation between thing and object: insofar as it is inseparable from its brand, a piece of merchandise is an object that defines itself through its own symbol, which is stamped upon it. By virtue of branding, things are defined on the basis of their own aesthetic symbol.
10 Corso Como seems to bring two paradigms together: it applies the model of the bazaar to the world of brands. From a certain standpoint, this is a reaction to the recent development of the market: the multiplication of brands, the explosion in the production of luxury, the extreme diversification of patterns of consumption, the desire to look for local products of quality have all led us back to a primitive situation where consumers face a mass of commodities whose nature and quality they cannot understand. The concept of store makes brand and commerce coincide, transforming the act of buying into a total aesthetic experience. This is the same development we witnessed in the art world with Documenta 5, when Harald Szeemann organized the first exposition, titled conceptual, in, in which the secondary auctoriality* of the curator replaced that of the artist.
Notes
*. Fr. auctorialité, a coinage that inserts the idea of authority into the term “author” by alluding to the latter’s Latin ancestor, auctor.
1. Plutarch, Life of Romulus, 11.2.
2. Pseudo-Longinus, On the Sublime, 9.2.
3. C. Barnett Newman, “The Sublime Is Now,” Tiger’s Eye, 1.6 (1948), p. 51.
4. Carolyn Lanchner, in Constantin Brâncuși (New York: MOMA, 2010).
5. Carla Sozzani, Interview with Orlole Cullen in “The Sozzani Sisters,” in Italian Style Fashion since 1945: Exhibition Organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, ed. Sonnet Stanfill (London: V&A Publishing, 2014), p. 263.
6. Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
7. Olivier Zahm, Une Avant-garde sans avant-garde: Essai sur l’art contemporain (Dijon: Presses du Réel, 2017), pp. 10–16.
8. Frank Fanselow, “The Bazaar Economy or How Bizarre Is the Bazaar Economy Really?” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 25.2 (1990), pp. 250–65, esp. 262.
9. Ibid., p. 253.
10. Ibid., p. 254.
11. Ibid., pp. 255–6.
12. David Wengrow, “Prehistories of Commodity Branding,” Current Anthropology, 49.1 (2008), pp. 7–34.
13. Ibid., p. 25
14. Ibid.
15. On the contemporary brand, see Liz Moor’s important Rise of Brands (London: Berg, 2007).
16. Hardly by chance, the first groundbreaking discussion of value in marketing is B. Gardner and S. Levy’s famous article “The Product and the Brand” (Harvard Business Review, March–April 1955, pp. 33–9), which lays stress on the impossibility of referring consumer activity to purely social determinants, which the French sociological tradition that runs from Tarde to Bourdieu does persistently.
17. Ibid., p. 35.
18. Ibid.
19. See David Ogilvy, “The Image of the Brand,” Advertising Age, 26.1 (1955), p. 17.
2
The Eternal and the Ephemeral
Collection is the act farthest from creation. First of all, from a chronological point of view: it takes place when everything that could be created has already been developed. It arises when the last spark of creation is extinguished. It takes place after the exhaustion of all available energies. It marks the end of all things and all actions, even of silence and of emptiness.
It is the act farthest from creation. And it is so from a historical point of view as well: it is a tendency opposed to any development, a gesture that shuts history once and for all. It is the movement that puts an end to the cycles of birth and death, the idea that brakes the wheels of loss and return.
It is the act farthest from creation. And it is so especially from a metaphysical point of view: to choose, to select—that is a gesture diametrically opposed to the movement that allows a subject to produce or engender. Collection never lays hands on forms. It is not animated by concern for what might emerge, but rather by what must vanish or what must be eliminated. It produces waste, it aims at the oblivion of what exists.
It is the act farthest from creation. And yet it is only thanks to it that there can be art. For centuries we have celebrated creation as what is most sublime in the human being. And yet without the desire to collect—in other words, the desire to create a fundamental difference between castaways and survivors—all creation would be no more than the painfully automatic reproduction of what there is. Without a judgment that recognizes the work of art amid a series of objects, without the act that physically separates it from other spaces, from other objects, from other possible uses, everything would be condemned to collapse into its own function. This is not simply a sociological matter; the question is that creation is never sufficient for the production of art. Granted, there would be no art in our society if there were no artists; but it is only in our judgment that art exists qua art. Nor is it a matter of exhuming the romantic superiority of criticism over poetry. For it is only in the activity of collecting, and not in critical activity, that the judgment encounters and molds reality; it is only in a collection and through collecting that a thing becomes a work of art. It matters little whether we are dealing with a museum or with a private domestic treasure.
Carla Sozzani is not a simple collector. She has not limited herself to accumulating, over time, various objects that should testify to the nature of her taste, to her encounters, to her intellectual adventures. Nor has she become invested in the attempt to elevate the activity of collecting by tying it to other ends than itself (knowledge or dissemination, philanthropy, politics). In her hands, collecting has stopped being a marginal, elitist, and eccentric cultural practice to reveal a deeper nature, radical and primeval: that of a mechanism of individuation and generation, not only of art, but of any cultural object and fact. The collection is only the physiology, the breath of what German idealism had called the objective spirit. Besides, the word “collection” could make a perfect rendering of ancient Greek logos—a word that conveys the idea of reason, spirit, and intelligence.
Collecting is the life of the soul. To know is always an act of collecting: to relate to the world always means grasping images, and every image is but a collection of the real—in the double meaning of something that we have chosen, detached, and separated from the continuum of colors and forms on display before our eyes, but also of something we would wish to carry with us. Conversely, every collection of images is a spiritual and eminently cultural form: to gather and display images on the same surface is not to produce an inert album but means ipso facto imposing upon the collective mind a movement or a change. To collect images periodically signifies imprinting on mind and thought a completely unprecedented rhythm of change and development.
It was in this frame of mind that Carla Sozzani contributed to revolutionizing the fashion press. It is thanks to her and her peers that, from the 1980s on, fashion magazines stopped being gazettes exclusively dedicated to feminine clothing and its forms in order to open to the totality of human artifacts. The magazine became the official space of visual communication: textual matter was reduced, images were the ones designed to communicate. But the collection of images did not respond to the rhapsodic logic of a kind of iconic Wunderkammer [cabinet of curiosities]. Every issue became an instrument for harvesting style and for doing research on it—on style, conceived of as a family resemblance that envelops all things, not only the objects officially recognized as art, but all objects that populate private and public space. Thus it was the very idea of art that found itself transf
ormed: an object’s capacity to make beauty exist was no longer tied either to a medium or to some specialized technical discipline (painting, cinema, sculpture). Any substrate and any object could become an object of art, in other words could get a place in this collection of images on paper, which is nothing but an avant-garde form of the museum. On the other hand, by renewing the tradition of Diane Vreeland and Alexey Brodovich at Harper’s Bazaar and of Alexander Liberman at Vogue, Carla Sozzani surrounded herself with the best photographers of the moment for the sake of bringing a new language to the pages of her magazines—a language liberated both from strictly documentary obligations (because fashion photography had no obligation to submit to the obsession with evidence for “it was so and so”) and from the metadiscursive or supremely critical pretensions of contemporary visual art. And this new photographic language, which would be that of our modernity, profoundly changed publicity and public communication. “Bound” to pay heed to clothing, accessories, and objects of everyday use, photography ceased staging an object as still life and turned instead into a true story told through images, a story in which clothes were the narrators rather than the protagonists. It was in the pages of Carla Sozzani’s magazines that our world and our society learned how to make the photographic image not only a major art but also a privileged and paradigmatic form of self-consciousness. It was in these magazines that photography became not only an instrument of knowing or witnessing what is happening around us, but the main tool for constructing a world qua collection of everything that is worthy of our gaze and that, precisely for this reason, has a right to survive in collective memory. The collection is at once the invisible watermark and the secret scaffolding of this profound transformation that Carla Sozzani has triggered through her editorial practice, which was part of a movement that changed for good the role of the photographic image in our lives.
The Transitory Museum Page 3