Artbucks

At least when McDonald’s was the last word in corporate disposable cool, it made no pretenses about being the embodiment of an edgy, organic, East-meets-West cultural aesthetic. But Starbucks, now seemingly more popular than coffee itself (opening up stores left and right at a time when McDonald’s is closing hundreds), apparently believes itself to be the Ani DiFranco of the Chain Restaurant Lite. For some reason, the folks at Starbucks think customers will pick up a copy of Inspired: Jazz From the Soul while waiting in line for their lattes simply because the coffee chain has deemed that CD worthy of its shelves. The thing is, people do pick it up, implicating themselves in the grand illusion that the Buck has its stir stick stuck on the pulse of urban hip.

But whatever. That each Starbucks store sells a selection of music in which the primary instruments are rain sticks and mandolins, that Starbucks has teamed up with Visa to launch a credit card, that Starbucks customers can now enter to win a tour of the Tuscan countryside on a Vespa motor scooter, that Starbucks masks its strategy of suffocating mom ‘n’ pop coffeehouses by promoting its touchy-feely philanthropic efforts around the globe and downplaying its profits (check out www.starbucks.com if you don’t believe me)—all that is horribly annoying. But may I present for your consideration another, even more subtle, dimension to the evils of Empire Starbuck: the art.

Unlike its eclectic-roots-fusion-soul-world-beat listening options, Starbuck’s art, aside from the occasional piece by a local artist, is not for sale. In fact, Starbucks has signed a “confidentiality agreement” with various art “vendors,” according to the nice woman at Starbucks headquarters, so we don’t even know who makes this stuff. The art is there not to be looked at, not there to be talked about, not there to be bought.

Still, a study of the works hanging in your local Starbucks can lend insight into the sort of art the post-dotcomer set hangs on its walls. Feeling ironic, RN&R editorial assistant Miranda Jesch and I met at the new Starbucks on the corner of Plumb Lane and Arlington Avenue, ordered Chai tea and sat at the back of the store, where most of the “artwork” is hung. (We both admitted that the fact we were even discussing the art surrounding us was ridiculous.)

In the series of three panels that hung directly above us, two of the pieces were abstract images made to look like petroglyphs, with primitive squiggles forming simple patterns against a rich red-brown background. The third was a close-up image of siding; it could have been a computer-altered close-up photo of a rusted barn, but more likely it was entirely computer-generated. Visually pleasing in the most vague, formless way, these works would fit into the home of anyone going for the I-want-my-apartment-to-look-like-a-Japanese-space-age-farmhouse look. Miranda and I discussed how, in much of the abstract art of today, the illusion of depth and texture is paramount—perhaps a half-hearted attempt at resistance in a world obsessed with flatness (television screens, billboards, etc.).

“It looks like they are trying to be different,” Miranda observed. “But they’re being the same by being different.”

On the wall opposite us, nostalgic primitivism was abandoned for hip digitalism. These three pieces, with their repetition of simple shapes and their happy, 1960s-kitchen colors, looked somewhat like ‘60s pop art ironically appropriated for the techno age—they might serve as Sasha and Digweed’s next three album covers.

“You’re supposed to say, ‘This is hip, and hip art, when it’s all really superficial,” Miranda said.

“Indeed," I assented. There’s nothing more seductive than the illusion of depth.