The politics of creativity
How we turned Jaguar's new aesthetics into ethics
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LinkedIn is ablaze. A hodgepodge of sales pitches, hot takes and self-help advice, LinkedIn is a strange place at the best of times. But since Jaguar unveiled its new ad, the platform has been united in what to talk about.
There are moderate voices (we hated other rebrands, too!), mild skepticism, a few defenders (Jaguar wants to reach Gen Z!), and Rori Sutherland, but mostly the reaction was a scathing critique or, per Jaguar’s CEO, “vile hatred.”
As far as ads and rebrands go, this one hardly counts as the most dramatic. Remember when Tropicana, GAP, Netflix / Qwikster, and - god bless - MySpace updated their logos?
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It’s not the rebrand’s aesthetics that landed Jaguar in the news. It’s the ethics that it purportedly conveys.
Students of Wittgenstein and Nietzsche would say that ethics is never separate from aesthetics. Aesthetics always communicates values. Per Jaguar’s press release, the team wanted to communicate their brand’s originality. The ad quotes its founder, Sir William Lyons, who said that “a Jaguar should be a copy of nothing.”
Others read the ad as a modernist affront a.k.a. the attack of the future. Tucker Carlson offers an untethered architectural position applicable to comparison between Volvo and Jaguar advertising. “Buildings that are warm and human and that elevate the human spirit are pro-human … and Brutalism is not. Architecture is the purest expression of the society that produced it."
Apparently, so are the ads. Per the popular reaction to Jaguar’s ad, exuberance, color, and surrealism are out, and nostalgia, literalness, and anti-conceptualism are in.
One can argue that the culture industry often reflects the society and its currents. There’s preppy aesthetics of the Reagan era, social realism of communist countries, Bauhaus and Surrealism of the Weimar Republic, or trad wife of the past couple of years. The culture industry equally often reacts against the mainstream society. In the 1960s, there was mod, 1970s had hippies, 1990s rap and hiphop, and there was girl boss of the 2010s.
The bigger picture is how much politics permeates our interpretation of intentions behind visual culture and its products. When cultural output is either “woke” or “MAGA,” it forces brands to pick a side.
Often, the side is picked for brands, without their intention or input. Barbour, founded in Scotland in 1894, has been labeled as a “MAGA brand,” prompting Derek Guy to weigh in: “But this doesn't mean you can't wear it if you don't share those political views. It's all about knowing the different levels of Barbour,” followed by the styling advice for those with alternative political views.
In a heavily politicized society, all our choices — what to wear, how to spend our time, how to inform and entertain ourselves — turn into value judgments. Brands’ creative output, marketing communications, fashion direction, styling or merch are no longer an expression of the brand or individual creativity. They are a moral position.
Postmodernism (another Carlson enemy) argues that there is no truth, only interpretation. A dominant interpretation is inevitably going to steer brands’ output, from the products they make to how they market them, into one creative direction over another. The best scenario is to have both the mainstream and the reaction. It also seems the least likely.