How Do Printing Shops Think About Art
Reproductive stikers
2021/01
Each 40cm x 60cm
58 “Artistic” logos commission made by 36 online Printing Shops and reproductive stickers made of the logos.
I committed 36 online printing shops charging under 200 Chinese Yuan in Taobao to make logos according to their own understanding about ‘artistic’. Many shops offered multiple logos, How Do Printing Shops Think About Art? as stickers is the assembly of the 58 logos.
Working Process:
Design requirement: Design alphabetic logo “Artistic” without icon black art industry no demand of visual style
The explaining process (about the word) during commissions.
Screenshots of conversations to Taobao printing shops.
When “初更视觉设计” knows the commission is about contemporary art, the designer said:
“Got it. Real Artist...... It’s done for, I feel I got the most difficult order in the history....”
“We fear fine art photography the most...”
“Yours are in the high level of fine art..... upper level”
How Do Printing Shops Think About Art is firstly the inspection of the visual paradigms in culture production. Ideally, it offers a way to collect and document all these paradigms. In the opposite, this is also a cooperative creative production.
Without doubt, this is also a provocation of elite artists and designers, not only in the sense of the contrast between the extreme low price and the careful designed outcome, but also in the sense of ideology: in the eyes of elite culture producer, these images are unacceptable (this is also the real experience when they see it without explaination), but the images that poorly paid Taobao designers made are excactly according to the ideology which elite culture had made. Their first reactions revealed the role culture plays in the regard of consolidating class interests.