The idea of cultural homogenization or the "McDonaldization" of the globe discussed in the Stuart Hall reading parallels a particular work by the British artist Gillian Wearing. In her video I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing, a woman somewhere in England is seen blowing into a glass Coke bottle that produces a few bars of the titled tune. The screen then splits in half to reveal another woman in a different place doing the same. This formula continues every minute or so multiplying exponentially the different women of different ethnicities in sync blowing away until all that can be seen are tiny grids of squares pulsating a breathy rhythm.
What is at issue concerns the artistic response to this phenomenon as either reaction as a form of criticism or reflection as homage of a perceived reality. The artist employs a strategy of recycling a successful commercial media campaign to reinvent the old message of world peace as a multicultural statement about the pervasiveness of a Western corporate giant. I read Coke being tantamount to cultural imperialism. But is the fragmented perspective of the multiplicity of difference as sameness addressed by the artist symptomatic of her cynicism or her irony towards the idealized Benetton world as global community? Certainly, westernized information and media technologies create a perception of a homogenized "world-culture" but how do contemporary artists address this question culturally? Is Wearing aware of her role as artist within the sociopolitical history of the British Empire as a colonial power? Or is she simply reviving, as is vogue the nostalgia of something from the70’s?
Her distance is very apparent in this work as what transpires as narrative seems to be in the third person. This leads to a possible belief that Wearing is well-versed enough in this cultural discourse to portray herself as an observer who understands the politics of corporate identification in relation to cultural identity. So is she guilty of a kind of cultural tourism because of her Britishness or is she questioning these historical antecedents through a cool sense of 90’s irony?
So is the majority of contemporary art a cookie cutter pattern of apparently oversimplified, over-resolved work echoing the mass media claim that we live in the same Star-Trekked world. This is a fine line in how many artists today negotiate the eggshells of issues concerning race, gender, politics or sexual orientation.