It's Natural ~ Luzangela Martinez

**faces are Christmas wrapping paper**

Advertisements are everywhere. They can be found in several different platforms such as the internet, social media, television commercials, billboards, and the radio. Advertisements play an important role in our lives like fruits and vegetables do in our daily diets. There impact on society results in people buying things that can either change their appearance, improve their health or increase their “economic and social position” within society. This impact is caused by the “images [that] influences [our]…..new desires and aspirations” whether its from a woman holding a beer can, a model demonstrating clear skin with a new product or the smile on a kids face. As stated in The Society of the Spectacle, “[w]here the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.” In a similar way, fashion also plays an important role in society. Through fashion, people can express themselves by highlighting their beliefs, creativity, and ideas of life. Indeed, both advertisements and fashion go hand in hand.

The following piece below was inspired by Andy Warhol. His past childhood fascination of comics and celebrity tabloid magazines and movies resulted in his inevitable attraction for celebrities, mass consumerism and money. From this, most of his artworks became influenced by his past experiences. In most of his work, he would get something that’s recognizable to most people such as consumer goods. One of his most popular pieces was Coca-Cola and Campbell’s soup, consumers goods that were very popular in the 1960s. For this reason, I chose something that is popular to many young women today—the natural hair movement. Many individuals have participated in this movement, including myself, where they are attracting into buying natural shampoos, conditioners and leave-ins that do not contain any harmful chemicals. In Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe pieces, Warhol utilized bright and vivid colors that enabled his work to stand out. Similarly, I also added a bright background to allow my piece to stand out. 

Society of the Spectacle  

Images influence our lives and beliefs on a daily basis; advertising manufactures new desires and aspirations.

“Like society, it builds its unity on the disjunction.”

Hyperallergic Magazine

Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

Wangechi Mutu: A New Face for the Met

The status they confer is costly in more ways than one.

That is, women express “wealth, status, family, tribe” through their bearing and ornamentation, which are “all languages definable as art.”