Money for Old Hope:How the Design Museum shot itself in the foot.

The Design Museum in Holland Park managed to shoot themselves in the foot not once but twice with their recent Hope to Nope:Graphics and Politics 2008-18 exhibition yet, despite that, it was still an informative, educational, and edifying experience.

If one of the museum's aims is to show how good design leads to better products and ultimately better living and better values then this particular exhibition backfired in that it showed how shoddy design, Make America Great Again caps, Vote Leave merchandise, and the like, actually had more effect on most people and therefore had managed to steer the direction of the narrative during at least the last two to three years of the decade Hope to Nope covered.

More worryingly, and perhaps a huge illustration of why the right are holding so many cards at the moment, was the back story to the show. Initially a paying exhibition the museum's management had to drop the entrance fee when several of the owners of the exhibits on display pulled them in protest at the Design Museum's decision to host a private event for Italian aerospace and 'defence' company Leonardo (breathtakingly named for the artist). This resulted in a third of the one hundred or so exhibits, including Shepard Fairey's iconic 2008 Hope poster of Barack Obama, being returned to their owners.  How ironic that an exhibition devoted to the power of protest should itself be hit so savagely by a protest! The Design Museum clearly took a hit on this but did they lose more money because of the protest than they made with the iffy Leonardo deal? We can but hope so.

Mr Bingo - People Who Voted for Brexit Who Are Now Dead tea towel (2018)

It made for a strange visit and it stood at odds with the exhibition's mission statement not to endorse any "particular point of view" but to show how "global protest moments and divisive leaders have made people more politically engaged than they have been for a generation". The pull of some of the show's keystone works certainly proves the latter point to be true but the hosting of an event for a company that produces missiles, armoured vehicles, and naval artillery (killing machines basically) certainly suggests a "particular point of view" was taken by the museum's management if not the show's curators who've been faced with the indignity of having to explain, constantly throughout this three room exhibition, exactly why so many plinths are standing empty.

It's even more a shame because the initial concept, the curation, and the execution were otherwise first class. From humorous anti-Brexit tea towels, Mr Bingo posted the idea on Instagram and he got so many likes he decided to make a real one, that reflect the referendum's generational divide in a none too delicate way to the left-wing anti austerity Spanish political party Podemos's election manifesto that, in the tradition of 'culture jamming', had been mocked up to look like an IKEA catalogue the exhibition space, despite some glaring gaps, was still full of fascinating things to take in.

Yet Brexit is (probably) happening (catastrophically, chaotically, and with much unnecessary damage to the UK) and Podemos did not replace the Christian, and conservative, People's Party as the government in Spain (although Pedro Sanchez's Spanish Socialist Workers' Party took over in June) so was it the politics that deterred people from voting for them or was it their reliance on good design?

Podemos election manifesto (2016)

I suspect it's the politics. Trump's base and the sort of people who voted for Brexit, they don't seem to me to be the kind of people who worry about design. If you've ever visited a far right website (and I do it for research for these blogs sometimes) you'll notice that design, along with spelling, grammar, punctuation, and any semblance of truth, was something, that if it was ever there in the first place, was sacrificed to the altar of blame, hate, scapegoating, and incitement to violence long ago. 

IKEA catalogues and blunt political satire on a tea towel? Those kind of things are just not going to make the same impact on the people whose votes may ultimately decide the direction of travel. But a pro-Brexit Wetherspoons beermat, a giant bus with a massive lie painted on its side, or, in America, a good ol' fashioned trucker's cap 'promising' to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN? These things speak to those that've been sold the lie by the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, and Fox News that there's some sort of unholy alliance between the metropolitan liberal elite, the EU, and often desperate asylum seekers conspiring to keep them down.

The Eurosceptic owner of JD Wetherspoon, Tim Martin, has so far introduced 700,000 pro-Brexit, admittedly his version is a fairly soft Brexit, beermats to his booming chain of nearly 1,000 pubs and from June 2015 to October 2016 Trump's team invested more money in headgear (that had been designed using a standard Times New Roman font to give the illusion of being mass produced in an American factory) than they did on polling. At least the story of the Brexit bus ends on a (slightly more) positive note. Greenpeace bought it, parked it outside the House of Parliament, and started to ask some awkward questions about what Brexit would mean for the environment. As with almost everything to do with Brexit there will be no clear, or truthful, answers.

CaliFame - Make America Great Again cap (2015-?)



North - Britain stronger in Europe campaign identity (2015/16)

If these items are lacking both design chops and truth they achieved their desired result which is something you can't say for North's Remain in the EU campaign. They're not even aesthetically pleasing so it's hard to see them even swinging over an undecided voter. 

Of which there were many and this, of course, was the key battleground in the referendum. Just as much as most people would admit they couldn't understand all the complexities, the legal implications, and the nuts and bolts of Brexit many simply had a gut instinct, and we should definitely not underestimate just how much racism had to play in this, that they wanted out. They wanted to bloody the nose of David Cameron and George Osborne and all the Westminster career politicians, even if in doing so they'd empower an even more privileged, entitled, cabal of crooks and liars.

Possibly the most depressing development of all this is how little we now seem to be responsible for our own decisions. All our lives we've known that the newspapers we read, and less so the television channels we watch, both reinforce and sharpen our prejudices. But with the rise of social media, with the mistrust of the mainstream media, which both Corbynites and Trump supporters never tire of telling us is crooked and conspiratorial, and the shocking development that barefaced and unapologetic lying, even demonstrably provable bullshit, is no longer deemed shameful but can be advantageous and politically expedient, these extremes have moved so far apart that the middle struggles to hold. Boris Johnson, just this week, dog-whistled to racists and caused a spike in reported abuse of Muslim women and that, remarkably, seems to have brought him closer to, not further from, number ten.  

Cambridge Analytica data dashboard (2016)

There's a plywood wall halfway through the exhibition that follows the exponential growth of social media since 2001 when Wikipedia was launched. MySpace followed it in 2003 and three years later Facebook opened to the public. It now has two billion active users, WhatsApp has 1.5 billion, Instagram 800,000, and Twitter 330,000. Most of these (except WhatsApp which is encrypted but is owned by Facebook and is starting to charge some users so watch this space) scrape away at the data we freely provide and as we've come to realise this some holier-than-thou types are trying to live a little more off grid.

Their concerns about these unregulated behemoths, if Facebook was a country it would be the second richest in the world behind the US, are not unjustified. So far they're just using my data to flog me a mobile phone (which I don't need, I've already got one), tell me what offers Sainsbury's have on (which I see when I go to Sainsbury's anyway), sign me up to a dating website (ahem, cough), or get me to plan my own funeral (depressingly) but soon the algorithms will get better and then there'll be some genuinely scary stuff starting to happen. Hopefully the misadventures of Cambridge Analytica and their former CEO Alexander Nix (above) will provoke governments into taking action and providing a framework so this can't happen. But do you trust the current UK or US administrations on ANYTHING?

Design is Play - Trump 24K Gold-Plated poster (2016)



Magazine cover carcicature of Donald Trump (2014-?)



Magazine cover carcicature of Donald Trump (2014-?)



Magazine cover carcicature of Donald Trump (2014-?)



Fake Donald Trump TIME magazine cover

Chris Riddell - Theresa May cartoon (2017)



Chris Ridell - Brexit cartoon (2017).

Some clearly do. For every golden Trump swastika (a riff on Michael Bierut's H for Hilary logo that suggests Trump's agenda may not be dissimilar to other divisive leaders in the past) hung in San Francisco's Mission District prior to his 2016 election, for each mocked up magazine cover (spoofing Trump's own egregious photoshopping and framing of a Time magazine cover that never actually existed but nevertheless he had displayed in several of his golf clubs), and for all of Chris Riddell's typically British satirical illustrations (think Hogarth or Thomas Rowlandson) of the disasters of Brexit or Theresa May's unstable government there are others, like the American street artist Sabo, who are more than happy to celebrate Trump, along with fellow travellers Steve Bannon, Julian Assange, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Ann Coulter as our saviours, bravely fighting the Galactic Empire's Death Star, represented here by a feint, sinister, Hilary Clinton in the role of Darth Vader. 

Elsewhere we can marvel, or more likely recoil, at Pepe the Frog's journey from harmless meme to icon of the alt-right (in 2017 Pepe's creator, Matt Furie, took legal action against white supremacist users of the meme and crowdfunded a new comic to relaunch Pepe as a peaceful and positive amphibian), read about (but thankfully not listen to) 'fashwave' music that's using synth pop to spread fascist views to those who might be put off by a load of skinheads screaming and shouting, and get an idea of how this impacts on people at the sharp end of these developments, those who suffer as a result of this blame culture, via Dutch author Richard Sluijs's 2014 book The Complete Lexicon of Crisis Related Suicides Vol 1 which tells the individual story, succinctly yet powerfully, of just 712 of the estimated 100,000 suicides caused by the economic crisis between 2008 and 2013. The bankers and politicians who oversaw, even enabled, this chain of events are not spared. The victims, for once, are given dignity and treated as human beings.

Sabo - Rogue Won poster (2016)

'Gay clown' Putin protest artwork (2013)

Elsewhere other populists and demagogues get it in the neck. Putin is portrayed as a 'gay clown' (there is, of course, nothing wrong with being gay, or even a clown for that matter, but Putin has at best made sure Russia hasn't moved forward on this issue as many other countries have, and at worse has overseen a terrifying rise in homophobic assaults and anti-gay legislation), there are photos of anti-corruption protests against Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbuil's Taksim Square and against Jacob Zuma's greed, cronyism, and lust to hang on to power regardless in South Africa, and there's a catchily titled Satirical painting by Song Byeok, a state propaganda artist who escaped North Korea after famine killed his parents and his sister and, once safely in South Korea, produced a series of works that mocked his former output. For 'balance' it's been hung alongside North Korean paintings of cultural and industrial 'progress' that look, for all the world, like they belong in Stalin's time. There's even an ISIS flag. Well, a photo of one. Perhaps an actual one was too much even for the Design Museum! You don't want to upset those Italian arms dealers.

Murat Germen - Taksim square protest (2013)



Francois F Swanepoel - Protest against President Jacob Zuma (2017)



Song Byeok - Satirical painting (2013)

While the Rogue Won poster, the ISIS flag, and the rise of the alt-right are both depressing and terrifying the story of the fightback, those who deposed Zuma and Mugabe, those who tried to depose Erdogan, and those who escaped their own certain death under the Supreme Leaders of North Korea give us hope. For there is as much, in fact more, countering negativity in this show than there is negativity. Thankfully.

Women's march placards remind us of that glorious day in January 2017 when women, and men, marched in anger at Trump's pussy grabbing boasts, sexism, and partriarchal policies (and were asked some awkward questions about 'pussies' by the kids they'd brought along). These marches saw upwards of 4,500,000 in over 900 cities rejecting authoritarian rule and division and rejecting it loudly and joyfully.

 

Women's March placard (2017)



Women's march placard (2017)

Elsewhere there are Green for Grenfell memorial and Unity Heart Ribbon pin badges (and a Three Billboards Outside Grenfell, er, billboard that riffs on Martin McDonagh's controversial recent film) made in honour of the diverse community that lived, and, in the case of 72 of them, died in the most deadly British fire since Piper Alpha in 1988, in that tower block but also to celebrate the unity of the equally diverse community that came out to help, support, and rescue survivors, there's a video of Mike Monteiro's How to Fight Fascism talk (in which Mike decrees "the world is a mess. A certain set of people designed it to be a mess. Now we need a different set of people to design our way out of it. Fascism is knocking on our front door. This is how we knock back), and a monument made to celebrate Kosovan independence from Serbia. Unveiled in Pristina on the first day of Kosovo's independence it is now repainted annually with the flags of countries that recognise Kosovo's independence.

There's space devoted to movements, both centralised and nebulous, like Black Lives Matter, #metoo, the Arab Spring, Momentum, and the Chega de Pagar o Pato (I Will Not Pay the Duck) protests that took part in Brazil in 2015 and 2016. 'Paying the duck' is a Brazilian term meaning 'to take the blame for something that is not your fault' and the Sao Paulo State Federation of Industries commissioned this huge inflatable duck, you'd need a big bath to get in with that quacker, in protest against government corruption and tax rises and it became the emblem of the movement that eventually saw President Dilma Roussett impeached and removed from office. It even rocked up at the Rio carnival. Ducks just wanna have fun.

Faisal Metalel, Omar Benyermak, and others - Green for Grenfell memorial and Unity Heart Ribbon pin badges (2017-?)

Fisnik Ismaili and Ogilvy Kosova - NEWBORN monument (2008-?)

Chega de Pagar o Pato (I Will Not Pay the Duck) protests (2015/16)

Anonymous mask (2008-?)

The show ends with the All-Seeing Trump in which the 'misfortune' telling machine makes idle threats and promises a 'terrific nuclear war'. There's a warning sign next to it advising that some of the views expressed may offend but, in truth, none of them are as awful as the ones that regularly spout unregulated from the cat's arse shaped mouth of Trump himself. That's the really worrying thing.

Despite the caveats that follow it'd been a great show, I'd learnt a lot and hopefully conveyed some of that in this piece - and I've not even had room to digress upon other avenues the show took me down (the Brixton pound currency which celebrates local culture and local heroes like David Bowie, the ubiquitous and slightly irritating Anonymous masks, Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury book, global warming posters, Je Suis Charlie, Venezuelan protest shields, and the Swiss referendum on expelling foreign criminals. The Swiss have four referenda per annum and in this case 58.9% of voters opted against the motion put forward by the right wing Swiss People's Party).

Applause for the curators, Alice Black and Deyan Sudjic, for putting together such a good show, one that was both pertinent and necessary, but a big fat raspberry and an angry placard waved in front of the museum's management for undermining them in an attempt to line their pockets with cash from the military-industrial complex. A hyprocrisy worthy of the bullshitter-in-chief himself.

Andy Dao, Nathaniel Lawler, Jon Barco, Bryan Denman, and Anthony Atamanuik - All-Seeing Trump machine (2016)