Tetherd Cow Ahead

From today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

Faced with the overwhelming rejection of iSnack 2.0, Kraft has done an about-turn and ditched the name of its new Vegemite cream cheese blend.

I have to defer to Ben (comments on this post) and admit that it does have the whiff of an advertising hoax, despite Kraft’s protestations to the contrary:

The new name has simply not resonated with Australians. Particularly the modern technical aspects associated with it ~ Simon Talbot, company spokesman.

But as I see it, if it is a publicity stunt, then the po-faced attitude from Kraft is baffling. Talbot also stated:

At no point in time has the new Vegemite name been about initiating a media publicity stunt. We are proud custodians of Vegemite, and have always been aware that it is the people’s brand and a national icon.

Ben would undoubtedly say this is some kind of clever misdirection, but in my opinion, that kind of ploy can only work if the intended victims feel like they’ve been outfoxed or are amused. Since neither of these cards seem to be in play, all that’s left is bewilderment. Are they trying to cover their asses because it’s a crap joke that backfired? Are they sincere? Are they afraid that they’ve been caught cynically exploiting a loyal legion of fans? Is it all an attempt to spin out the publicity a little more?

Who knows? In the end, all that Kraft and their advertisers have done is to attract attention to a concoction of dubious desirability, and to confuse everyone. The Product Formerly Known As iSnack 2.0 will ultimately live or die on its market appeal, not on an advertising campaign. Since I believe it’s a poorly conceived grab at expanding market share by trading off the back of a cultural icon, my money is on die.

Good iMorning iCowpokes!

Well, down here in sunny ((That’s sarcasm, in case anyone missed it.)) iMelbourne we have just survived the insanity that is iGrand iFinal iFootball whereat the official name for the new Vegemite product (formerly known as ‘Name Me’) was kicked off. And as promised, the iCow is bringing the new name to you hot off the iPress.

I know what you’re thinking – that image above is a cheeky Photoshopped pisstake of the actual name which I’m going to reveal to you in due course…

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Was that long enough for the cold reality sink in? Yes dear iFriends, the people at iKraft, demonstrating a dorkiness that transcends anything I thought was even possible, have climbed on the iBandwagon and, in some kind of bizarre and incomprehensible grab for what we can only assume to be their concept of coolness, named their product iSnack 2.0. It’s worse than I could possibly have imagined. And I can imagine pretty bad possibilities.

How many kinds of wrong can be encapsulated here? The whole ‘i’ phenomenon has become so hackneyed and feeble that it’s really only Apple that can carry it off in any way, and that’s solely because it’s their heritage. Aside from anything, the ‘i’ was originally intended to designate ‘internet’ and if there’s one thing that Kraft and Vegemite has demonstrated extremely clearly, it’s their complete lack of intertubes acumen. Further to this, as if to underline their credentials as people who have totally missed the boat, they’ve appended the meaningless (but OH so hip…) ‘2.0’ to the name – if anything it would be Vegemite 2.0, not iSnack 2.0, which by any proper reckoning has just come out of beta and is in v.1.0.

What were they thinking?

Well it’s that time of year again Acowlytes, and as the world (quite inevitably) starts to become jaded by International Talk Like a Pirate Day, those of us who were pirates long before the fad came along, and will be pirates long after it fades, raise a cup o’ grog and drink to the the spirit unfettered minds and uncluttered horizons.

This year on The Cow I aim to repurpose ITLAPD into something a little more meaningful – a celebration of free thinking and provocation in the face of parochialism and institutionalization. Herewith on each ITLAPD The Cow will acknowledge someone who, in some manner or other, fearlessly challenges the status quo and questions authority after the fashion of a true pirate.

To kick off, since we’ve just been talking about the Cartrain/Damien Hirst wrangle, we tip our hat to the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop and its mouthpiece Red Rag To A Bull who describes itself as:

…a radical institution dedicated to the pursuit of “FREEDOM, TRUTH and JUSTICE in the art world and BEYOND”, and overblown statements. It was founded by a cartel of rich and powerful light industrialists in the depths of the bleak winter of 2009 when the world was on the brink of total financial collapse.

Red Rag To A Bull and L-13 have been champions to Cartrain over the last year, running their Street Urchins Art Appeal in order to raise enough money to reimburse him for the cash that Hirst’s original legal action cost. They did this by creating and selling meta-parodies of Cartrain’s parodies of Hirst’s work. You gotta love that endless spiral of iteration and self-referentialism.

L-13 also produce some rather remarkable work in their own right. This will come as no surprise to anyone who recognizes Jimmy Cauty as the name behind them. Cauty is perhaps better known for being one half of the KLF, and later, with Alex Paterson, as The Orb – the architects of the Ambient House genre.

With L-13 and RRTAB, Cauty continues to sock it to the narrow-minded, the clueless and the haughty in the manner they truly deserve. A recent Red Rag To A Bull manifesto says in part:

Unlike Cartrain and his gallery we are not intimidated by lawyers, and if an injunction is issued we will simply ignore it on the grounds of freedom of expression. We also operate a ‘copyright out of control’ policy which in our world makes us immune from prosecution…

If they aren’t the words of a true pirate, I’m handing in my wooden leg. So, here’s to you, James Cauty and crew. May your seas always be calm and your powder dry.

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(I’m posting this early Acowlytes, because on the 19th the full Curse of the Black Cow takes hold and there’s no telling how much sense anything will make for the day. If ever you wanted to Ride the Mad Cow, that’s truly the time to do it).

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The art world has never really been known for being sensible, but there is a feud going on at the moment in England that must surely rank as one of the most petty and unfathomable squabbles since my school days when Charlie Peerbohm poured green paint on Debbie McMahon’s fingerpainting in first grade. Synopsizing: last year, a 17 year old street artist named Cartrain made a number of satirical collage portraits of the much more famous artist Damien Hirst using copies of some of Hirst’s own images. Hirst took exception to this for reasons unknown and, using his considerable fortune, pulled legal muscle on Cartrain to force him to hand over the portraits (so that they might be disposed of) along with £195 in compensation (the amount of money that Cartrain allegedly made from selling them).

Considering that Damien Hirst is one of the most commercially successful plunderers of popular culture of all time, this seems churlish at best, and downright petulant otherwise.

I’ve never been a great fan of Hirst’s creations. In my view he’s just fine art’s version of a shock jock; he creates things that are supposed to put people’s noses out of joint under the pretense of making insightful or droll commentary. I could never quite put my finger on why his efforts annoyed me so much until one day, after getting brain freeze from a slushy whilst watching the sharks at Sydney Aquarium, it came to me: Damien Hirst’s art has no sense of humour. It is po-faced pretension of the most vacuous kind. And I think Hirst quite possibly believes that he really is saying something profound. This latest episode has pretty much confirmed my suspicions.

Cartrain, on the other hand, is my kinda guy. He does have a sense of humour and he makes interesting and provocative social commentary. He’s not an artistic genius, perhaps, and owes more than a little to Banksy, but heck, he’s a teenager after all – he’s got plenty of years ahead of him to develop. The portrait of Mr Hirst that you see reproduced above, is one by Cartrain that has escaped the iron clutch of Hirst’s moneyed henchmen and, via the blog of art commentator Jonathan Jones, found its way to teh internets. ((As anyone with an ounce of insight would have realised was quite inevitable given the circumstances. Hirst’s attempt to quash dissemination of the portraits looks all the more silly for his failure to understand their ultimate cultural context.)) Its sarcastic caricature of Hirst is surely well within the purview of artistic witticism. I believe the confiscated portraits are in the same vein.

But the thing that has really enamored me of Cartrain is the revenge that he he has wrought upon Hirst. In July this year, Cartrain visited the Tate Britain and stole a box of pencils from Hirst’s intellectually vapid installation Pharmacy which is on display there. He then created a mock ransom note demanding return of his portraits in exchange for the pencils. The note stated that failure to comply would result in the pencils being ‘sharpened’. Most anyone would consider that fairly amusing – this is not the mindset of a vicious person – but not Hirst, apparently. As one of the wealthiest artists of all time he looks sulky and pathetic as he stands on his assertion that his intellectual property rights have been violated.

And now, in what must be one of the most egregious over-reactions of the decade, the situation has escalated to the point where the police have arrested Cartrain over the stunt, and he has been charged with £10,000,000.00 for ‘damages’ and a further £500,000.00 for theft. ((Cartrain’s father was also arrested, on suspicion of ‘harbouring’ the pencils.)) Translating into American money, that’s over $17 million dollars worth of charges for a box of pencils. ((And I bet the security guard who was on duty that day would have been a lot more attentive if he’d realised he was guarding pencils with that kind of pedigree…))

This whole debacle reminds me of nothing so much as the Metallica/Napster affair in 2000, and Lars Ulrich’s indignant posturing over the ‘damage’ that file sharing was doing to the band’s sales. The outcome of that particular episode was that Ulrich came out looking like an ass and nothing changed except for Napster getting shafted. Metallica certainly isn’t hanging out at the soup kitchen as a result. Similarly, it’s difficult to comprehend Hirst’s disproportionately vehement reaction to Cartrain’s satirical jibe. What the hell does he care? It’s not like he’s going broke anytime soon.

Maybe it’s simply that Cartrain’s portraits are just a little bit too incisive, and the emperor doesn’t like everyone seeing right through his clothes to his cubic zirconia-encrusted skeleton…

Well, dear Acowlytes, as promised a post or two back I[tippy title=”*”]Actually, Violet Towne did the acquiring…[/tippy] acquired over the weekend a jar of the new Kraft product provisionally known as ‘Name Me’, in order that I could taste-test and review it for you in time for the launch of the official moniker next Monday.

As you can see, it comes in a jar that is similar to Vegemite, and sports the Vegemite logo. On opening, the main thing I noticed is that, unlike regular Vegemite, this is a vacuum-sealed product. As all Australians know, after you open a bottle of normal Vegemite it will keep pretty much forever in the cupboard without any fear that it will either go off or get eaten by bugs. Vegemite is one of the incorruptibles.

Not so with ‘Name Me’. It needs to be kept refrigerated and is ‘best consumed within 4 weeks of opening’ – a legacy of the cheese base, I guess.

The most disconcerting thing about the new Vegemite product is the appearance. It looks exactly like melted chocolate or Nutella. I can already see this as the basis for numerous schoolyard practical jokes and school lunch tragedies. Not to be daunted, and mindful of my service to The Cow, I spread some on a piece of crusty bread and gave it a go.

The bottom line is that it’s not that bad. It tastes more of plain ol’ Vegemite than anything else – just as if you’d put a bit of actual Vegemite on some very buttery bread. I was happy to eat it, and the whole jar will no doubt get consumed in due course. The real sticking point for me as a potential customer, and the hurdle that I think Kraft has to jump, is that I don’t really see the point. It doesn’t offer anything that I wouldn’t get with my usual Vegemite hit, but it has the drawback of needing to be kept in the fridge, and looking like it should taste sweet and chocolatey. It is the Paris Hilton of toast toppings; it is all appearance and no substance. Its reason for existence is completely questionable.

Add that to the fact that we already have a number of products that more than fill the salty yeast-extract niche, and my projection is that in a year or two’s time ‘Name Me’ will be nothing more than an evolutionary dead end in the taxonomic record of breakfast comestibles.

Anyway, come Monday ‘Name Me’ will actually have a name, and that should be entertaining. I’m sure that Kraft is desperately hoping that, like the competition run for the name of the original Vegemite back in 1922, it will whip up a truckload of consumer interest and go on to make them megabucks. I predict that they won’t have the gumption to stick out ten or more years though – the period of time over which Vegemite languished until it finally took off in the late 1930s. I bet they won’t have the guts to pick the name out of a hat, either, like they did with the Vegemite name competition. That would be anathema to the control-freak culture of modern advertising.

If they did have a hat it would have to be a big one though, and these are some of the names that would be in it – a random selection from over 13,000 suggestions on the ‘Name Me’ site – along with my estimations of their likely success:

•Cheese Plus (Too much like Cheese Pus)
•SpreadEzy (Yawn)
•Super-fun-mite (What?)
•AusCream (Eww)
•Creamdelight (Double Eww)
•Vethen (Vethen? What are you smoking?)
•Score!!! (So you got some of what they’re smoking too…!)
•YamYam (No No)
•Lunch Mate (Snore)
•Sloppymite (You’ve never worked in advertising, have you?)
•VevletMite (And you never finished school, did you?)
•I LOVE IT! (OK, calm down. I’m sure you do, but we’re looking for a name here…)
•Stampede! (Oh – on account of the sloppy brown appearance? I think not)
•Hero (No – we don’t need another one)
•Grail (Steady on there Crusader! Don’t overreach)
•Downunder (Er… again, not good connotations, given the appearance)
•Chanuw (That thing’s a keyboard – you’re not meant to hammer it randomly with your fists…)
•Moorishmite (Did you really mean to spell it like that?)
•DivinityVegiDip (Yup – that really rolls off the tongue)
•Magic Mono (You’re not supposed to inject the stuff, pal…)

Someone stop me! 13,000 of the damn things! I’m beginning to see the kind of daunting task that Mr Kraft and his troops face! Stay tuned to The Cow for the real name when they announce it. It can’t be worse than any of these.

Can it?

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*Actually, Violet Towne did the acquiring…

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On tonight’s tv news in relation to discussions with concerned residents over untended bushland in Canberra:

If anything caught alight in there it would spread like wildfire!

Yes it would lady. Exactly like wildfire.

At least it wasn’t ‘it was like a bomb going off’.