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A kind of unintentional parody hovers over everything, a tactical simulation, a consummate aesthetic enjoyment [jouissance], is attached to the indefinable play of reading and the rules of the game. Traveling signs, media, fashion and models, the blind but briiliant ambience of simulacra.
-Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (1993)
The ostensible purpose of this Louis Vuitton ad is to promote the company's luggage line by highlighting a popular bag known as a duffle. The work, like many of its kind, features a celebrity endorsement, but in this case, the model is unexpected: the former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and first and last President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. It would be an amusing choice for a spokesman if it weren't so troubling.
Photographer Annie Leibovitz, herself a celebrity, shot the ad.1 It is a curious work and one we should not dismiss as representative of the kind of irony so prevalent in contemporary advertising. There is something here, or not here, worthy of our attention, and I will use some of Jean Baudrillard's notions, including seduction, simulacra, and simulation, toward discovering what it is and how to make sense of it.
WHEN IS SEDUCTION NOT SEDUCTION?
The intensity of the image is equal to its denial of the real.
-Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (2005)
I open a magazine and am struck by an advertisement. It is an ad for the luggage maker Louis Vuitton, but I find myself describing the piece as by Louis Vuitton. This is not a slip of the tongue but some apprehension of a different kind of meaning Is it an ad? Is it art? Is it something else entirely?
I call a few friends in the business - my business, advertising - and ask if they have seen it. To a one, they like it. I find myself dismayed and wonder what it is I am actually seeing. I feel frightened, not seduced, by the image. Am I not supposed to be seduced?
Baudrillard writes in Seduction: "Where a linear movement knocks against the wall of consciousness and acquires only meager gains, seduction has the obliquity of a dream element or stroke of wit."2 It is...