3
more democratically-oriented “ideoscape” of environmentalism is produced by
corporations and organizations whose ideologies represent both paradigms. In the present
discussion, the contest arises between BP’s employment of the global mediascape and the
environmental movement’s ideoscape. Like mediascapes, “ideoscapes” are defined as
“concatenations of images, but they are often directly political and frequently have to do
with the ideologies of states and counter-ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to
capturing state power or a piece of it” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 36). In the present analysis,
Greenpeace and the Green Party match that definition (below).
By considering artistic agency in global advertising, as well as by acknowledging
the implications for media consumers and critics, this essay interprets integrated branding
as a source of the “contestation” described by Appadurai’s description of the
technologically-supported use of global imagination by “ordinary people…to deploy their
imaginations in their everyday lives” (p. 5).
In the following sections, I present an historical literature review of the century-
long development of artists into graphic designers and the trajectory of their existential
discontent, including a review of two design manifestos as major critiques of design in
advertising in the second half of the 20
th
century. This is followed by a theoretical
framework and a review of semiotic method prior to an analysis of the production of the
signs and their attendant meanings in the BP campaign.
Tracing artistic agency in advertising
For graphic designers, the roots of anti-consumerism ideology reflected in the
broader ideology of anti-globalization go back to late 19
th
century when mass marketed
magazines, transcontinental rail distribution of national product brands, and advertising
for them drew artists into standardized, commercial work at a mass level (Bogart, 1995).
Convention