The Carnivalesque Flows: Art and Advertising

departure at the time of carnival was the procedure of consequent parodying images that belonged to the sphere of sacrum. This procedure was stirred by the both local and temporal decline in social hierarchies 2 . Additionally, the ordered seriousness is substituted with a ubiquitous laughter whose semantic properties revolve around the tautological self- referentiality and self-reflexivity 3 . In this sense, the religious symbols are profaned and there is no legitimate authority to restore the temporally lost sanctity. Moreover, the overtone is nonserious which fact can be explicated in terms of common acceptance of whatever takes place during the carnival. As far as the former centuries are concerned the phenomenon fits the specific realities in the sense that it offers an entirely alternative reality to the one and only one hierarchy of values the people might have been confronted with. The situation is, however, far more complicated when it comes to the modern times. Nowadays, in order for individuals to partake of an alternative reality there needs to be no carnival. The disputes about blasphemy are mostly attributable to the conflict of interests that arises between artists and the church. The former strive to attract publicity and catch the attention of the media while the latter struggle to preserve the status quo of Christian iconography. There is still even more to that. Mainly, the profanation mentioned can be just as well a subject to discussion among artists themselves. This is because the question of profanation itself has been redefined and translated into the contemporary system of values. It is, paradoxically, based on a high estimation of culture and civilisation in strictly Occidental sense. The artistic dilemmas, particularly in the realm of pop-culture, revolve around the treatment of high cultural artefacts rather than religious ones. However, to a large extent the problem of religion remains at stake. The following example may produce a substantial account of the artistic controversies beside the strictly sacral context.

On the next page, we can see two overally similar pictures. These are from top to bottom: Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and advertising poster by Marithe et Francois Girbaud. The underlying theme of the newspaper article in which they appeared is the examination of the cultural implications for the fact that the fashion house advertisement has been recently banned from public exposure.

2 Ibid., p. 152.

3 Ibid., p. 150.

2

Leonardo da Vinci, “Last Supper”

Advertisement of Fashion House Marithe et Francois Girbaud

3

In contrast to what might be expected, the author writes that the offence was not against religious sentiments but against the tastes of people who consider da Vinci’s painting a work of art and an important signifier of Europe’s cultural legacy 4 . The problem of religion is decentred by the question of civilisation. At this point, Bakhtin’s notion of seriousness is ascribed to the grandeur of civilisational heritage rather than Christian humbleness and subordination to authority. The author writes that the commercial character of advertising may be considered as profaning ‘high’ art in the sense that it ridicules civilisation and, consequently, ignites controversy mostly in western societies 5 . Situations like the one described often result from the fact in the postmodern world there is no longer place for distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’. But, still, the common conviction that ‘anything goes’ is utterly utopian as it is based on a false premise. The transmission of high art into pop-culture is merely permissive. The cultural contextualisation of art is always somehow justifiable.

Even though the religious motivations for spontaneous outrage are supposedly eliminated, the actual reason for such misunderstandings seems to be still embedded in religious consciousness. The outrage is additionally reinforced by the sudden appearances of these advertisements. This is definetly a deliberate marketing strategy which draws attention first and foremost by causing interest and provoking confusion.

By the same token, within the cultural discourse, we can observe attempts at establishing a method of reconciling tradition with the present time. In order for a given marketing strategy to be efficient as well as effective, the means by which a given message is transmitted must be constructed in such a way so as to address different levels of sensitivity. On the one hand, the advertisement in question puts stress on beauty and physical attractiveness, which is common in popular culture. On the other hand, nevertheless, enforcing connotations with a masterpiece of art is aimed at provoking on a much more complex level. This conflict, as inherent in the structure of the advertisement, can be divided into the competition between the “beauty of consumption” and the “beauty of provocation” as Eco describes it. The former, he writes, is generated by the consumerist commerce which imposes itself in a vast variety of marketing structures 6 . The latter, on the other extreme, violates all the aesthetic canons and tends toward avant-gardism of the early

4 Maria Poprzęcka, „Ciuchy i świętość, in: Gazeta Wyborcza, Saturday, 7-8 May, 2005, p. 12.

5 Ibidem.

6 Umberto Eco, Fragments from „Historia piękna”, in: Wysokie Obcasy, vol. 17, 30th, April, 2005, pp. 42-43.

4