In the past week I revisited Learning from Las Vegas for another project and also finally read No Logo, Naomi Klein’s 1999 anti-brand manifesto—a book that feels somewhat dated today, a victim of its own success in articulating a ‘90s Gen X idealism that has been wrung out of us in the twenty-five years since by the very forces that Klein identified. In the ‘90s, brands had begun to saturate American public space as well as the culture that such space had historically supported: “In 1974, Norman Mailer described the paint sprayed by urban graffiti artists as artillery fired between the street and the establishment,” Klein writes. “Twenty-five years later, a complete inversion of this relationship has taken place. Gathering tips from the graffiti writers of old, the superbrands have tagged everyone—including the graffiti writers themselves. No space has been left unbranded.” Another few decades later, in 2024, it’s difficult to even remember the world that came before this. No Logo feels dated in 2024 because it’s a dispatch from the twilight of the (comparatively) unbranded world that has since been overwritten, the logic of branding having escaped its traditional corporate confines, now internalized by subcultures, institutions, and individuals, prodded onward by social media and often lacking realistic alternatives to that form of self-promotion.
If brands didn’t fully conquer our cultural and mental space until the ‘90s, they had already done so in the physical world decades prior. Learning from Las Vegas, that canonical text of architectural postmodernism, written by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in 1972, describes the saturation of the physical built environment with billboards, neon signs, and other forms of advertising, following from the widespread adoption of the automobile and the need to see “enormous signs in vast spaces at high speeds.” The authors made a compelling case that the visual cacophony of the Vegas Strip and commercial highway strips everywhere could be understood as interesting and even beautiful, or at least worth taking seriously. More importantly, perhaps, Learning from Las Vegas describes the ongoing contemporary bifurcation of surface and substance, a process encouraged and even demanded by the technology and media that were emerging in the late 20th century. This transition was embodied by their concept of the decorated shed: a generic, unremarkable building covered with signs and ornamentation that define its outward appearance in lieu of the architecture itself. The decorated shed was a harbinger of the brand-infused culture to come: Not only did the external appearance of something tell you little about what it actually was, but that surface often deceived you, by design. Places like Las Vegas, absurd as they seemed, were at the forefront of this contradiction, teaching a vanguard to drop their defenses and simply revel in it.
The Vegas Strip was a more innocuous symbol of postmodern culture when its semiotic funhouse was limited to physical space. No Logo describes a more insidious version where the billboard-laden highway is projected internally, framing more facets of experience than just driving. Brands were no longer just visual logos emblazoned on mass-produced merchandise and roadway signage but identities and worldviews, disseminated by companies like Nike and Disney (again, this condition is so familiar now that it feels banal to even point it out). Klein described a new kind of branded space that had begun to proliferate in support of these efforts: the superstore, pioneered by Disney and Coca-Cola in the ‘80s but truly coming into its own in the following decade with destination zones like Virgin Megastore and consumerized third places like Barnes & Noble. Superstores in big cities were the glimmering portals to these brands’ expanded universes, generators of “synergy” that, at their most potent, even reversed the relationship between cities and their symbolic built environment: Increasingly, the latter would legitimize the former. This, too, has become deeply ingrained in the urban fabric in the decades since. The neon signs that Learning from Las Vegas admired may have loudly dominated the landscape but unlike these new more complex and permanent brand relationships, you at least left them behind as you sped by in your car.
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