Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
September 2022
September 4–December 18, 2022 Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising (2022) explores the often mercurial relationship between art and advertisement. The exhibition traces the evolution of this dialogue through decades of artistic manipulation of advertisement’s power visual lexicon. Since the 1970s, creative innovations led to dramatic shifts in the possibilities for photography as artistic expression, as photo-based artists reworked advertising strategies to challenge the increased commodification of daily life and later to appropriate the command these images have over the viewer/consumer. As the branding strategies of marketers shift, so too do the visual tactics of artists responding to the pervasive world of advertisements. By exploiting advertising’s visual vocabulary and adopting its sites and formats, and through re-photography, appropriation, and simulation, artists create a shared photographic language that puts the onus on the viewer to determine what precisely these pictures are asking of us. The exhibition compiles arresting images from leading artists such as Chris Burden, Victor Burgin, Roe Ethridge, Victoria Fu, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Kim Schoen. A catalogue featuring texts by Rebecca Morse, Dhyandra Lawson, and Lisa Gabrielle Mark was been published on the occasion of this exhibition. Learn more at LACMA.