Debenham's versus Abroad

Debenham’s, the archetype of don’t-frighten-the-horses retail, has revealed that 70% of its customers have difficulty with the Italian-ish names bestowed upon warm beverages and that from now on, cappuccino will be “frothy coffee”, latte will be “really, really milky coffee” and so on.

Of course, Debenham’s isn’t really responding to the linguistic befuddlement of their punters. Instead, they’re grabbing a few bytes of publicity by positioning themselves as defenders of good old English common-sense, in the face of all those noisy foreigners and their funny talk. If a fine, upstanding Englishman such as Nigel Farage ever stopped bellowing for long enough to drink a coffee, one supposes, he’d want to drink a really, really milky one, not one that probably tastes of garlic and subsidies and committing adultery in the afternoon.

But why stop with the coffee? Next time I go to Debenham’s, I don’t want to be troubled by fanciful verbiage of any variety. If I want to buy a jumper, I want it to be called a jumper, and nothing else. Well, maybe a blue jumper, or a really, really baggy jumper. And the same goes for spatulas and duvets and footstools. In fact, the very name Debenham’s is an affectation too far. They should tear down all their signage and replace it with a small sheet of paper bearing the words “A SHOP”. And have Nigel Farage on duty outside, in a Union Jack waistcoat, shouting at anyone who uses a word that ends in a vowel.

How can I plot the downfall of civilisation on the back of a fag packet when there are no fag packets left?

From December, all cigarettes in Australia will have to be sold in uniform, olive-green packets. I’m not going to get into a fight over the rights and wrongs of tobacco laws, beyond mentioning what a doctor friend pointed out to me, that it costs rather less to treat a terminal case of lung cancer for 18 months than it does to manage a cocktail of dementia, osteoporosis and various other age-related conditions for 20 years. No, what really interests me is that the battleground on which the government and the tobacco companies have been slugging it out isn’t actually the thing that actually kills people – tobacco itself and its various noxious components – but something apparently peripheral, the pictures that surround the tobacco. First it was the advertising, now the boxes. They’re getting closer to the stuff itself, but they’re still not there. It’s as if someone had reframed that cliché in defence of the US Second Amendment: “It’s not guns that kill people, or even people that kill people – it’s the designer holsters that the guns come in.”

The reason Big Tobacco has resisted these encroachments so stoutly is that they know that they can’t hope to keep making profits based on the quality of their products alone. Branding and packaging are what keep their industry going but it’s a bigger fight even than that – without pretty pictures, huge chunks of capitalism would wither and die. Even supposedly sophisticated consumers can be gulled by a good label, as academics have shown with tweaked wine tastings (but let’s pass over the fact that that article was the work of pretty-boy auto-plagiariser Jonah Lehrer). BAT and Philip Morris aren’t just sticking up for your your right to kill yourself; it’s also about your sacred right to bullshit yourself as you do it. But which amendment covers that?

PS: In the Guardian, Alex Hoban predicts that the tobacco companies will make a virtue out of the enforced uniformity, as part of their strategy of co-opting anti-corporate adbusting techniques. Nice.

Francesca Eastwood’s handbag: all bound for Mu Mu land

Francesca Eastwood, spawn of Clint, has prompted a minor brouhaha thanks to her involvement in an art stunt that involved a $100,000 Hermès bag being chainsawed and set on fire. It’s essentially a reality-show re-run of the KLF’s notorious Burn A Million Quid event, albeit on a smaller budget, and some of the aghast responses are pretty similar – Ms Eastwood should, we are informed, have put the money towards some more worthy cause. But is it really so much more heinous to destroy a bag worth $100,000 than to spend $100,000 on a bag in the first place? Or to sell it for that much? (Unless of course that’s what Eastwood and her conspirator/boyfriend were actually intending to say, in which case I’ve suddenly decided that it’s lame, studenty gesture politics of the most obvious kind.)

One more thought: how much direct involvement did the Hermès marketing department have in all this?

I’m Damien Hirst and so’s my wife!

An interesting article in the Independent introduces a couple of artists who call themselves Damien Hirst. Inevitably, it’s not just a straightforward case of fakery or passing-off. These ersatz Hirsts claim to have aesthetic motives for their appropriation, one turning Hirst’s name into a Duchamp-style readymade, the other commenting the lack of originality in the echt artist’s work, and his own lack of direct involvement in many pieces that go to market under his identity. 

Hirst and/or his representatives appear to be unhappy with the situation, which is odd; surely, neither of the provocateurs would have changed their names had young Damien not appeared on the scene, so he can legitimately claim both artists to be his own creations, which gives him the right to auction them off for some absurd sum. If they’re really lucky, he might dismember them first and put them in a fishtank.

PS: While we’re there, Jonathan Jones disembowels Hirst’s latest exhibition.

Birth, school, work, #Klout

After I deployed those Klout-related ramblings, I was wondering why employers and marketers are starting to pay so much attention to a metric that is apparently so easy to manipulate by retweeting gossip about Pudsey the dog or getting on the right side of someone on that bloody Observer list. And I realised that Klout doesn’t really measure the subject’s online influence – instead, it measures the subject’s desire for online influence, even if it’s an ersatz version of the same. Today, in the decadent West, what few jobs there are involve selling the abstract ideas that we call brands, so the ability and inclination to game one’s own Klout score 20 points higher than it really should be is something of a marketable skill, one that potential employers will hope you can apply to the ethereal gewgaws that they’re trying to flog. They know your enormous Klout score is utter bullshit; and they want a slice of that bullshit.

Similarly, there has been much grumbling over the past couple of decades about the increasing pointlessness of examinations. Exams don’t measure what people know about English or maths or physics any more! They just measure how good people are at passing exams! Which is, in fact, entirely what they want to do. Most employers don’t give a toss whether you can calculate the surface area of a sphere or explain why “a slice of that bullshit” is stretching a metaphor just a little too far. Instead, they want to see the alacrity with which you’ll jump over barrels and through hoops of their devising. “Raise our Klout score,” they bellow, and you only need to respond: “How high?”