Consumerism

Andy Warhol, Brillo Soap Pads Boxes, 1964

plywood boxes with serigraph and acrylic
boxes: 43.2 x 43.2 x 35.6 cm each
Purchased 1967
National Gallery of Canada (no. 15298.1-8)

"I want to be a machine."

Fueled by the New York scene and central to Pop art, Warhol generated his own celebrity as well as massive amounts of artwork. Not only did he produce Brillo at his studio, known as The Factory, but also numerous series of prints, films, and music.

Andy Warhol shocked people with his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, coupled with such provocative statements as: "The reason I'm painting this way is because I want to be a machine." By taking his imagery from advertising and the mass media, Warhol attacked the separation of art from mass culture. Unlike the corrugated cardboard originals represented in "Brillo", these sculptures are made of wood. By making the cartons non-functional and uprooting them from their ordinary context, Warhol forces us to look at them freshly. They comment on the way that commercial packaging transforms a mundane, household product into a glamorous, desirable commodity. Warhol also focuses our attention on the significance of these objects as representatives of the impersonal, commercialized consumer society in which we live.

Source: CyberMuse

Revolutionary Road.

"This is what's unrealistic. It's unrealistic for a man with a fine mind to go on working year after year at a job he can't stand. Coming home to a place he can't stand, to a wife who's equally unable to stand the same things. And you know what the worst part of it is? Our whole existence here is based on this great premise that we're special. That we're superior to the whole thing. But we're not.Look at us. We're just like everyone else. We've bought into the same ridiculous delusion, this idea that you have to settle down and resign from life."

Personally, I loved this film. I thought it really highlighted the true horrors of conformity that accompany suburban life and the hopelessness of the American Dream. Perhaps the idea was over dramatized, but I thought it really brought out a darker side of middle class life that films don't often choose to represent.