Batmobama and the global flea market
Friend, colleague and fellow blogger Marc Berry pinged me a link to this late last night. It’s official title is Batmobama & Robiden.
It was on a site called Etsy specialising in selling affordable art online. I instantly contacted the artist behind it, Paul Richmond, asking his permission to feature it on my blog. Within about another five minutes, I’d decided to buy myself one of the 200 prints he was selling.
This was the first time I’d visited Etsy, but within a matter of minutes I’d completed a transaction to the value of about $45. I find the dynamics of the transaction quite peculiar.
I became aware of the product because Marc recognised that it combined two things I blog about on a fairly regular basis – Batman, and the 2008 American presidential election. He knows that I’ve been fixated with some of the ‘Obamaganda’ coming out of this campaign, and have even gone so far as to create some of my own, but as far as I’m concerned this is in a class of its own, both thematically and in terms of its artistic quality.
Because I was able to quickly identify Paul as the artist behind it, and to contact him through the site, even before I heard back from him I had a sense of him as an individual. With this in mind, my decision to purchase was accompanied by an awareness that the bulk of the cash I was parting with would be going to another human being.
The knowledge that there were only 200 prints available made it sufficiently unusual to seem worth spending roughly £25 on – not a sum of money I’d normally part with for something I was going to hang on the wall. The fact that there were only 35 remaining added enough of an ingredient of urgency to compel me to buy one there and then, rather than going away and talking myself out of it.
I guess the final factor in this is that I can vaguely remember a friend of mine singing the praises of a service called Etsy. I can’t remember the details, I just remember someone telling me that Etsy was great, and that it came from somebody whose judgement I trust.
The particular confluence of circumstances added up to this transaction typifies the way in which the social web is changing commerce. It is slowly re-establishing more traditional values in terms of what a transaction like this signifies, taking place between two human beings, in one of a million colourful corners of the global flea market.
As to the question of whether the piece itself is an accurate characterisation of the key players in the forthcoming election, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Exhibit A…
…and Exhibit B.
Tags: election 08, obamaganda
