The Centerpiece

We must protect art from being diluted by forces of commercialization to ensure our survival.

If I had a penny for every time my parents said “Don’t touch that” when they took me to a store as a kid, I'd be rich. I’d waltz ahead of them through the corridors of Home Depot and Homesense envisioning myself in an episode of Property Virgins. One aisle would be lined with different door knobs ranging from t-handles, to prongs, to crystal dummies. Another would have an aerial showcase of chandeliers barely distanced apart, their jeweled finishings practically breathing on each other in anticipation of a kiss. These objects were deified on my TV screen and to see them in person was like approaching a mythical beast. You could hear the reverent tone that aspiring homeowners used when discussing these objects. As if they’d never truly live without knowing what it’s like to be in their orbit. That feeling reverberated through me whenever I'd reach for something fragile in the store. My father would say “Put that down,” in a stern voice, “if you break it, you buy it.” His command would spook me into putting the products back on the shelf, but that only added to their mysterious aura, planting the idea in my head that these tiny objects were bigger than any of us. That they were strong enough to build our dreams around. Just like the HGTV hosts cooing in the ears of hopeful homeowners, these fixtures were real things that could elevate our lives to where we imagined them to be. Eventually, I concluded that an object’s ability to transcend the trappings of existence was the purpose of art.

Along the way to this reasoning was the home decorating we’d do after returning home from the store. When I was maybe three years old, my family moved into a house that was being built from the ground up in the developing suburb of Richmond Hill. What was once a mass of wooden beams and fiberglass transformed seemingly overnight with furniture. Paisley chaise longues in the family room, clawfoot hardwood tables in the basement. It was like we’d manifested ourselves into a page of Home & Garden. Every issue of  H&G or Today’s Parent that gathered at my mother’s chair were all the same. Each of them choked with photos of women dressed in their best ensembles from Laura. They’d smile blissfully to the camera as they stood in front of their Tuscan-style homes and neon green lawns. In that home, I felt closer to whatever these women bound by ink were feeling. I loved the way products made me smile, or cry, or reflect. I loved to see what emotional response they’d get out of people. Few experiences are as sacred to me as when a friend would visit and utter a few oohs and aahs as they looked around. I even loved it when the parents lingered to titter about the details of the design. “What shade are these walls, eggshell or dapple?” “Did you change the tiles or did the backsplash come with the house?” And my parents seemed to love answering. If not for them I may not have such a deep reverence for objects. Respect for possessions hits differently for black folk. Some of our belongings are symbols of my family’s triumph against a racist and sexist world—some of those things my parents had to fight for their right to buy. I grew up surrounded by evidence that people like me survived for centuries despite the ways racism tried to suppress our presence. 

An object’s ability to elicit feelings that pre-date you and connect you with the people who informed them is the artful part. Magical, even. Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and director/photographer William Klein understood this and honored the altar of consumerism we all worship in a capitalist world, by accentuating its artistic element, shrugging at the suggestion that all consumption is hollow. All symbols are reflections of their referents and therefore contain an aspect of authenticity within.

What I’d come to realize during those early years is what these artists were keen to depict in their works: that the eliciting of emotion is the art of product, the art is not the product itself.  Warhol demonstrates as much when he filmed 1960s icon Nico clipping her hair for 30 minutes in his film Chelsea Girls, forcing the audience to recognize the sanctity of these tiny but stabilizing rituals invoked by possessions. In addition to beautiful objects, my family’s house was rife with paintings and sculptures that I’d rub my grubby fingers into. I’d trail my fingers over the thick bulbous grooves of paint in the still life hanging in the den. To feel the urgency of the brushstrokes was a sublimely haunting experience. It was like the painter was there in the room with me. Without the obstacle of commercialization, art can bring down the walls separating the viewer from their emotional history. The unfiltered humanity necessary to create makes art a hypnotizing force to our most primal selves. The sensation we get from art should be deeply familiar to our bodies—and yet years of commercialization has severed that connection.

The 2000s were a great time to be alive technologically. Our tech felt advanced but had yet to foray so harshly into consoles that breach privacy.  In a world where everyone can see everyone, the innocent nature of aspiration has been replaced with an omnipresent pressure to fit in. This influencer will instruct you that you “HAVE to eat at Toronto’s hottest new restaurant,” another will tell you about the “CRAZY deals happening you CAN’T miss at this cutting-edge furniture store.” While that peer pressure is uncomfortable to live with and the FOMO is even worse, I find that it doesn’t make me feel disembodied. I was born at the cusp of the new millennium, all I know of food, furniture, and other things is that they’re always next to a dollar sign. I can accept this much and often find myself empowered by it. If I have the money to buy a full-course meal for myself at my favorite restaurant, Côte de Boeuf, I’m also paying for the cursive writing on the chalkboard menu, the freshly pressed linen tablecloths, the recommendations of the server, the pleasant jazz music drifting lazily from the coyly hidden speakers. For many mergers where products are artful, I know that money will leave me feeling pleased. But when visual and performing arts are treated with the same methodology, it leaves a strange taste in my mouth—and not in a pleasant way like the foie gras. The residual taste of art for profit’s sake is tasteless, leaving a matte black stain on my tongue like I’d just dragged it across a freshly painted road. 

It’s important to echo that this oblong taste did not have immoral or hopeless origins. As technology aged into the 2010s, everyone with a computer became better acquainted with the free appropriation of images. With a few clicks, you could curate your ideal aesthetic without the help of a magazine or television program guiding you. During my days spent on Tumblr, I’d scroll down my timeline each day to see a different collage board of something preexisting in a context they’d never previously been seen (ie. Kate Moss with a flower-crown imposed on her head and a speech bubble pouring out of her mouth that reads ‘As If!’). While the images were being manipulated, it was still done in the hands of individuals and were born from impassioned thought—two principal components in making art. Edits empowered young people by enabling them to connect with aspirational source material and frame it in their own understanding. While not explicitly classifiable as art-cum-product, these pieces would be made for the sake of social capital, or ‘reblogs,’ which dictated how many people got to see your content. With the assistance of a domain that anyone around the world can visit at any time, Tumblr created a gallery whose social impact matched its profitability. These artworks were monumentally effective in disseminating niche cultural knowledge to a wider public and building relationships based on the emotions they elicited. They had a pulse.

The Kate Moss you’ll see hanging in Yorkville’s Lumas Gallery is lifeless. The gallery is sandwiched nicely between a parking garage to a condo and an STK Warehouse, which stands opposite The Hazelton Hotel. The street is all about money and the experiences it can buy, from the imported cobblestones to the seasonal faux floral arrangements. Buying into the spectacle is where Lumas scores big and it uses the commercial aspect of pop art to pull it off. Works featured at the Lumas favor obvious, familiar symbols of wealth and celebrity, disregarding the cultural critique that’s essential to the making of pop art.  The irony of  “THE LIBERATION OF ART” neon sign adorning the front window of Lumas is not lost. A liberation from critical thought, perhaps. The Moss in question is a piece by Andre Monet featuring two rows of three identical prints alternating between red and orange. Recreating this piece in a Warholian style is less an homage to the man himself as recognition of Warhol and Moss as symbols of high society. 

Maybe if they were in a stand-alone show these pieces could be contextualized as the artist’s attempt at enacting elevated appropriation. Yet, positioned nearby is a similar quarter of David Bowie portraits done in the same style by Gavin Evans. A few months ago a Mick Jagger portrait in the style of Banksy hung in the window of Loch Gallery, a bit deeper into the village on Hazelton Lane. These are works that do the work for you, pieces that say “you get it” before you have the chance to process understanding. What makes this form of commercialization more worrisome than others is that art feels like the only pure way of informing identity we have left. 

On one hand, this is bad for artists as it leads to the cheapening of their art form through poor imitation. Another modern example is David Shringley, whose simplistic, font-based works have seen countless reproductions lining the aisles of Michaels or Homesense. On the other hand, the selling of identity leads to the commercialization of the self—we become the products. The image that comes to mind is Allen Jones’ sculptural works Hatstand, Table and Chair, which feature three fiberglass sculptures of women turned into furniture. These works speak to how commodification reduces the body to a soulless object, our existence becoming interchangeable with the symbols that have come to define it. We become slaves to trends and strangers to the artist’s actual intentions. 

Back at the Lumas Gallery, this can be seen in their recent investments in AI “artworks” that they attempt to sell for thousands of dollars. This isn’t informed by a genuine spark of inspiration in the collective consciousness or an attempt to capture a zeitgeist. It’s a reflection of the AI drama that’s taking TikTok and X by storm, with many creators earning viral posts based on challenging the merit of human-made art. One creator known as Slender O’Kenoshi makes AI artworks that feature the Stormtroopers from Star Wars in comedic, highly stylized scenarios. Baroque One, surely a play on Rogue One, shows a group of Stormtroopers sitting in what appears to be an elegant drawing room. Art like this denies all questions: what time period the design reflects, what the subjects are doing in the room—none of it matters. All that’s important here is that the audience feels a desperation to belong once they recognize the familiar symbols, inspiring a longing to be a part of the popular discourse. Commercial art acts under the guise of promoting individuality by using suggestive symbols but contradicts itself by originating from a marketing standpoint. If we’re not more attuned to personal taste we run the risk of creating a homogeneous artistic culture devoid of authenticity.

Arguably the most dangerous symptom of these artworks is how they could potentially cater to fascist regimes. We have authorities like Elon Musk to thank for this recent push in commercial art, with his anti-art sentiments inspiring people to speak negatively of the industry. When governments and overpowered businesses dictate who gets to make art and what art has to be about, an empire’s social health suffers. Historically, we’ve seen what censorship of the arts did during the Nazi regime. The promotion of art that upheld nationalist themes and the banning of what the Nazis deemed as ‘degenerate’ art led to the criminalization of ingenious thought. Once the visual arts were subject to this condemnation, the burning of books and educational texts followed. 

Art is such an essential part of shaping individual perspectives that if we were to lose it, it would make it easier for our governments to control us. Suddenly, it makes sense why AI art seems to be the favorite medium of the Trump administration. Instead of paying artists to create their desired imagery, the administration has AI art machines at their disposal to make art that adheres to strict guidelines within seconds. The lack of human essence involved in the making of these works reflects the kind of public that the American government seeks to foster. A public that doesn’t talk back, think for itself, and is paranoid of itself and those around them. The gradual shift from overtaking visual art to influencing other aspects of life with nationalist hegemony is already happening in the West. Companies like Artisan AI have posted billboards advertising to ‘Stop Hiring Humans’ and replace them with AI employees. Commercial art is a small but significant element of a species slowly attempting to eradicate itself.

We need to keep art safe because it is one answer among few to our salvation. Just as history shows how we’ve suffered from the censorship of art, it also shows its ability to persevere despite those attempts. As Nazis bombed Britain, artists like Henry Moore reneged against being erased by making his Shelter series of paintings depicting families bunkering in the subway during the Blitz. Despite constant threats from the police for depicting homosexuality in his films, Kenneth Anger continued to make sexually subversive artworks that withstood homophobic prosecution in the United States. Carrie Mae Weems’ photographs that represented the joy and stress of African-American life in the 20th century survived a harshly racist and sexist landscape. What is inimitable about these works are these historical contexts which help to inform our future in ways static commercial artworks cannot. Art is the compass we need to direct us forward in a world that feels increasingly directionless. 

Photos: Joshua Will. Model: Ashwyn Buckshi