study task 2 - book: No Logo

I wanted to read at least some of the book that my quote is from to get a better understanding of the context and find any other helpful quotes or ideas. In general the book isn't particularly helpful for the direction I want to go with when adressing the quote but it is a very well written and interesting book so ive included both interesting and relevant quotes here

By the mid-nineties, companies like Nike, Polo and Tommy Hilfiger were ready to take branding to the next level: no longer simply branding their own products, but branding the outside culture as well

Artists will always make art by reconfiguring our shared cultural languages and references, but as those shared experiences shift from firsthand to mediated, and the most powerful political forces in our society are as likely to be multinational corporations as politicians, a new set of issues emerges that once again raises serious questions about out-of-date definitions of freedom of expression in a branded culture.

when Philip Morrisowned Altoids mints decided in January 1999 that it wanted to get into the game, it cut out the middleman. Rather than sponsoring an existing show, the company spent $250,000 to buy works by twenty emerging artists and launch its own Curiously Strong Collection, a travelling art exhibition that plays on the Altoids marketing slogan, "Curiously strong mints." Chris Peddy, Altoids brand manager, said, "We decided to take it to the next level."

Chesney considered himself a distant relative of the graffiti kids — though less a cousin than a rich uncle. The way he saw it, as a commercial artist and billboard salesman he was also a creature of the streets, because even if he was painting for corporate clients, he, like the graffiti artists, left his mark on walls

 The campaign was in the cookie-cutter co-optation formula: take a cool artist, associate that mystique with your brand, hope it wears off and makes you cool too. It sparked the usual debates about the mass marketing of rebellion

For their part, many artists now treat companies like the Gap less as deep-pocketed pariahs trying to feed off their cachet than as just another medium they can exploit in order to promote their own brands

Rather than softening its image, Mike's feminist-themed ads and antiracist slogans have only served to enrage women's groups and civil-rights leaders, who insist that a company that got rich off the backs of young women in the Third World has no business using the ideals of feminism and racial equality to sell more shoes. 

 It is not Art for Art's Sake as much as Art for Ad's Sake. In the public's eye, art is yanked from its own separate and theoretically autonomous domain and squarely placed in the commercial.... Every time the commercial intrudes on the cultural, the integrity of the public sphere is weakened because of the obvious encroachment of corporate promotion.- Matthew McAllister 

the creeping corporate capitalism of our cosmic counter-culture"' and where the organizers regularly confiscate bottled water that has not been purchased on the premises, despite the fact that the number-one cause of death at raves is dehydration.

In our final year of high school, my best friend, Lan Ying, and I passed the time with morbid discussions about the meaninglessness of life when everything had already been done. The world stretched out before us not as a slate of possibility, but as a maze of wellworn grooves like the ridges burrowed by insects in hardwood. Step off the straight and narrow career-and-materialism groove and you just end up on another one — the groove for people who step off the main groove. And that groove was worn indeed (some of the grooving done by our own parents). Want to go travelling? Be a modern-day Kerouac? Hop on the Let's Go Europe groove. How about a rebel? An avant-garde artist? Go buy your alterna-groove at the second-hand bookstore, dusty and moth-eaten and done to death. Everywhere we imagined ourselves standing turned into a cliché beneath our feet