WHO OWNS CULTURE?

The archetypal individual creative saturates cultural spaces. Upheld by the obscuring and mystification of the creative process, presentations of ownership in culture parallel that of ownership in the economic sphere. In this text, through dissecting relations in the former, I intend to introduce a political dimension to the latter in a way relevant to designers.

Ubiquitous from the beginning of consumer culture (which are the spectacle and modernism), the mythical view of the individual creative is sustained through a mismanaged image, reproduced in storytelling about creative labour. This is mostly based on economic grounds, a creative genius figure is easier to market, to make the face of a product, or ghostproduce for to maximise profits. As a result, cultural production is often attributed to a single person, while concealing the network of people who are collectively responsible for it. This, in its camouflaging, mirrors Marx’s commodity fetishism.

One way to demystify production and construct more accurate models of ownership from a creator position, is the surfacing of influences and collaborators. Virgil Abloh’s design practice is centred around this idea, which was excellently materialised in the Louis Vuitton

SS22

menswear collection,

Amen Break

. Through fluidly moving across references, almost as a visual realisation of Derrida’s deferral of meaning, it surfaces the collection’s influences, from BreakBeat Lou and Lenny Roberts, Goldie, Wu-Tang Clan to many more. In the show notes Abloh (2021, p. 3) writes: ‘A chapter in the Black Canon’s preservation and teaching of Black art history on par with that of Europe, the

Amen Break

exemplifies the arts’ instinct to sample and resample a core design. Applied to fashion, where the staples of suits, tracksuits, shirts and t-shirts are re-interpreted on a never-ending loop, the

Amen Break

becomes a metaphor for the myth of ownership in contemporary creativity.’ This endless reinterpretation, layering, changing and infinite deferral of meaning explored through various semiotic pairs, such as suit–tracksuit and chess–chequers, embodies the articulation of the postmodern in Derrida’s

différance

and Baudrillard’s

simulacra

, now given shape through clothing.

Another way to clarify the ownership of cultural products can be from the viewer’s position, through a poststructuralist approach to reading these works. Since meaning is located not in the work itself, but in the interpretation of the reader, a new type of authorship emerges. As articulated by Barthes (1977, p. 148), ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’, the collective is given foreground over the individual.

Parallel to and inherently tied to cultural production, is economic production. Recognising the involvement of an extended network of people, and diffusing the social repute arising from the cultural products alludes to a more accurate distribution of material gains, one that represents the collective nature of making. If the concealing of creative production can be uncovered, so too the concealing of material production. This is the direction I hope to see figures like Abloh protest for, although the ultimate decisions regarding anything that impacts profits are made by executives.

Both the creative and interpretive threads of authorship and their common arriving point, communal ownership, are uncomfortable for those socialised in the “century of the self”, and for those whose material interest is against equatable distribution. Nevertheless, by tying the cultural aspects to that of economic, a powerful subversive idea emerges that allows creatives to push for material change through their labour.

Credits:

Images from

canary---yellow

, photographed by Filippo Fior

References:

Abloh, V. (2021) ‘

AMEN BREAK

- Collection notes’

Louis Vuitton Menswear Spring/Summer 2022

, Louis Vuitton, 24 June 2021. Available at

canary---yellow.com

(Accessed: 10 October 2021)

Barthes, R. (1977)

Image–Music–Text

. New York City: Fontana Press.