I'm With The Brand: Facebook

To skate through it really quickly - some of the oldest brands on the market - Brillo, immortalised by Warhol, Cadbury... Coca Cola... and if you look at the history of Coca Cola packaging - where the original design for the bottle came from - and where it is today - iconic, nostalgic... sexy.

Here's sexy: Rabbit, Jeff Koons, 1986.

Koons work is recognised as playful, ironic, slick, idealistic, perfectionistic, untouched by human hand. The object has clear sharp outlines: what we are actually looking at is a warped representation of ourselves - a reflection, standing in front of the object. Why a rabbit? Small cute fluffy animals, known for liking carrots - he's said that already: and for reproducing themselves as fast as bacteria with the pleasure of the open countryside, not a petri dish, which he has left unsaid. Koon's idea of fun? 

Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937, Dali

Koons is the ultimately powerful, glamorous business man, married to La Cicciolina, and runs his studio like a BMW factory. Art and business - art as business, the art of business, the business of art - and how he does it - that one is worth going to the pub and debating about for a few hours, more than a few pints, and possibly having a heated debate in an effort to seal the deal on any conclusions and standpoints at the end of the evening - Koons is that heretical, powerful, and flying in the face of artistic ideals that a brawl could be a likely outcome. Damien Hirst does the same; this debate much more visible to us in the press, a UK YBA. Hirst delivers scandal, outrage, hedonism and... perfection. Not mirrored, but no less a reflection of ourselves: mortal, gluttonous, the thirst for ownership; intensely narcissistic.

Artists deliver "experience". Dali tells us, in his perfectionistic, detailed technique, exactly what he is thinking. It exists without anyone having to look at it. A statement made along time ago, and now, thankfully, contemporary art explores the relationship between the image/object and the viewer, and Koons' Rabbit was a fore-runner. Koons as brand: branding is "the promise of an experience". Not the promise of an object, or a function, but an experience. Not: what is is, or what it does, but what it feels like. Historically, packaging was really all about promoting the product, and ensuring that the product wasn't tampered with - that premise hasn't changed, and is now enhanced with branding. Artists (Duchamp, thank you) teach us something useful: the name is the brand, and designers have understood this premise and laughed all the way to the bank. So: a sealed, branded package, guaranteed to have left the manufacturer and into your home in it's same pristine state.

And so it is with Facebook - the pristine package, the brand, the pristine interface. It dawned on me that I've never seen any variation, any deviation of a Facebook page. They re-organised the profile page, apps come and go - as Michael J Sandel so eloquently pointed out in his series: Justice 101 Harvard lecture series: Utilitarianism is what is best for most, but does it deprive the individual? I use a lot of user-friendly interface platforms, and here on Blogger, the design options and CSS/HTML openness means I can personalise my public persona ... within the design template set out by Blogger. That's a good thing, right?

we love a spoof...

Does Facebook enable the individual? Facebook has 500 million active users. Facebook (not Ltd, not .com, not Inc., just... Facebook, the singularity of the name coming from the weight of the art world) are sending out the clear signal, globally, that they cannot be hacked into, permutated, changed, messed about with, altered in any way, shape or form. Facebook is that innocuous sky blue... and a font that no-one can find online. Simple, effective, and more secure than the Pentagon. Facebook users are very vocal in their privacy concerns, and it seems that slowly facebook are drawing the strings tighter and tighter on privacy, and for those of us very well versed, the settings are there. Utilitarianism in action, a philosophical, moral, political ideal in action, right there on your iPhone.

But there's more: technology is change, changes the way humans think, changing in response to the masses, and forever Facebook will be in a state of development, responsive to users needs and desires, but this is it: the anonymous font, the sky blue, the rigid format, the rules. In Facebook, that's the constant, the outline for which the reflection of 500 million, for whom daily life is anything but.