"... a feature documentary film celebrating the independent and D.I.Y. spirit that unified a loose-knit group of American artists who emerged from the underground youth subcultures of skateboarding, graffiti, punk rock and hip-hop. This documentary tells the story of how a group of outsiders with little or no formal training and almost no conception or interest of the inner workings of the art world ended up having an incredible impact on the worlds of art, fashion, music, film and pop culture." (http://www.sidetrackfilms.com/films/beautiful_losers/)
I watched the movie, "Beautiful Losers" at the NYC IFC Center tonight. Having first heard of the movie when I received an oversized (8 1/2" x 11") flyer while at the Black Keys' performance at the McCarren Pool Party the other night, I was skeptical about a film so purportedly hip and slickly marketed to the hipster audience. Subsequently, I read a critical review about the movie on Salon.com, "The art world's Pepsi Generation," which issued a harsh critique of its reliance on sponsorship by Nike, as well as a reflection on the general price of success for artists. The article asserts: What does this large-scale commercial dependence of counter-culture on mainstream corporations say about the emerging contradictory nature of contemporary counter-culture, except that it has become diluted and may eventually extinguish itself by this dependence? Thus expecting that the movie would itself be this diluted, commercialized and mass-marketed product, I was anxious to see what I would think for myself.
The movie, a slow-paced, very straightforward documentary from the perspectives of prominent artists who were a fundamental part of Alleged Gallery's emerging success in the 1990's, featured very honest, thoughtful interviews with the artists and beautiful, fascinating - and inspiring - coverage of their artwork and the artists at work and/or play. With the exception of a brief feature of Nike street shoes, there was no strong sense of Nike product/company promotion. The only mention, in fact, of the artists' attitudes towards doing corporate commercial work was one artist, Geoff McFetridge, who was commissioned by Pepsi and discussed his feelings on the matter: he remarked that, although he listened and nodded his head to what the company envisioned for their commercials, he steadfastly continued with his own vision, anxious of how it would be received but determined not to sacrifice his artistic integrity. McFetridge's commercials were a hit, and the artist concluded that such a transition to mainstream advertising is not selling out but rather a maturation and evolution of the artists and the media. While this does not sit entirely soundly with me, I have to sympathize with the artists in their search to find a platform to produce this film and show such counter-culture coverage in a way that it is both accessible and enticing to a wide audience. As Andrew O'Hehir points out in the Salon.com review, most of the artists featured in the movie continue to steer clear of such commercial work in their artistic pursuits.
Even harsher than the review featured in Salon.com is the movie review in NY Times, "Keeping It Real, Totally, Y'know, Back in the Day," which very succinctly concludes with its opinion that the film, a tribute to the glory days of the Alleged Gallery in the LES in the 90's, basically is a testament to the decline of NYC counterculture, which has - this review claims - been co-opted by mainstream corporate culture. A quick browsing of the movie's website reveals a very clear taste of how Nike is marketing itself as a herald of counter-culture. From its graffiti-tagged street shoes to the company's hosting of D.I.Y. workshops in the LES, targeted to the general public but also specifically to the local youth, Nike very clearly is employing the movie to achieve a higher counter-culture street cred. Nike, a company traditionally loathed by a significant portion of liberal-minded people for its sweatshop labor practices, even announces on the website that it will auction off the shoes and donate the money to charity.
I haven't yet found any statement by the artists regarding Nike's sponsorship. One of the D.I.Y. artists of the movie, going by the tag 4 Am, has posted a blog on the movie's release last Friday (Aug. 8th) and the afterparty at Lit (the seedy, indie/hipster bar in the East Village). 4 Am, the blog, primarily features photos of the release at the IFC Center and drunken revelry at the Lit afterparty. This blog's profile gives no further information except for the 4 Am gmail account: the minimalism of the blog so far is perhaps a testament of the artists' reliance on larger media and organizations to promote them.
An ironic conclusion to this is that I skimmed over Wikipedia's entry on "Hipster" this evening, "Hipster (contemporary subculture)," which not only co-intricates hipsters and subculture by definition but continues to define hipsters as generally liberal- and independent-minded people who specifically try to avoid buying from large companies like Nike (and the Gap) with sweatshop labor practices. This Wikipedia article acknowledges the tension between the hipster as a counter-cultural, D.I.Y. liberal-minded individual who purchases vintage, rides bikes, makes art, and buys/farms organic on the one extreme, and the hipster who, on the other extreme, is a vapid superficial consumer whose main goal is to be stylish and ironic without espousing any specific belief (the Adbusters article cited in the latter construction of the hipster). Yet what the film reveals and Andrew O'Hehir points out in "The art world's Pepsi Generation," unfortunately sometimes the very liberal counter-cultural ethos coincides and depends on mainstream corporations and media. That counter-culture is co-opted into the mainstream is not news to me, but that the counter-culture is itself implicated in this mainstream aesthetic appropriation is what strikes me as problematic.
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