Absolut World

What's amazing about this Kanye West commercial for Absolut Vodka is the absolute seamless egotism it displays.

Because it's seamless, it's clear that the Westian Big Ego TM is a carefully cultivated image. He didn't come up with the idea and he didn't make the commercial. He just agreed to appear in it. So someone, or a whole group of someones, is invested in promoting the idea of Kanye's ego.

This commercial is the slickest (so far) of a short series of commercials and videos made for Absolut Vodka by a variety of personalities on the theme of "In an Absolut World ... ." Kanye's Absolut World would enable others to be Kanye for a few hours, although obviously only men would take him up on the offer.

Kanye's video is clearly the only one entirely commercially made because the other videos are nearly unwatchable, they're so boring. Except for this one by Owen Benjamin (Who? Exactly.) which is watchable, but not particularly good. And thereby we are able to know that the vids are probably the product of the ... er ... artists'? (comedians, musicians) ... own minds.

I'm also surprised at how unwatchable the one by superstar celebrity blogger Perez Hilton is. Hilton has been quoted in interviews discussing the narrative structure of celebrity media coverage (and has influenced my own thinking greatly) so I would have expected him to know how to pick up the pace on a simple commercial. But, despite its unwatchableness, this one is like the Kanye West ad in that it perfectly projects the image Hilton intends: Hilton is rushed to the hospital where he dies and is mourned by fans. In Heaven he finds himself in charge of everything. Only Perez Hilton would have to wait until death to be in charge. Kanye doesn't have to wait.

Then there's this one, which ended up being a self-congratulatory documentary commercial about a video installation made by Mexican artist Hctor Falcon. Pretentiously, as befits a visual artist, Falcon ended the sentence with "... there is no time or space," and somehow decided that a three-screen installation of video shot with a three-camera spread in places all over the world would demonstrate the collapse of time and space. And Absolut fell for it and funded his trip around the world. So good for him as far as that goes.

This whole tactic is interesting, no? Absolut is inviting famous, and not so famous, personalities to imprint their images--their brands--onto Absolut's brand. This has always been Absolut's branding strategy: that it is a flexible brand that suits itself to your culture, personality, and needs, maintaining its own brand only in the distinctive shape of its bottle.

But ultimately, Absolut has always controlled the manner in which that exterior brand is imprinted upon its own brand; Absolut gets to make the commercials and ads, and even this classic series of ads about contemporary artists was controlled and regularized by Absolut.

This new series at least appears to give over some of the control for both content and form to the personalities. Maybe that's just very clever and sophisticated filmmaking; it's hard to imagine ad agencies deliberately making commercials long and boring, but if that's what it takes ...

And it raises an interesting question about art: if a corporation sponsors an exhibition or arts event, there's always a suspicion that the company exercised a veto on brand-unfriendly content. But this is a step beyond veto. Clearly Absolut contributed something to the content, positively, rather than just operating a negative veto.

So is it still art (if bad art) if the collaborating artists are an individual and the branding arm of a corporation? Can corporations make art?

What do you think?