1. Eternal Life urns
At the end of 2006, Eternal Life, the funeral company in Farmington Hills (Michigan), announced its plan to launch a line of funeral caskets decorated with the colours and badges of Major League Baseball teams. Each urn would carry a message from the League recognising the deceased as a lifetime fan of the team in question. The Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, Tigers, Phillies and Cubs are to be the teams represented in the first wave of the launch. Eternal Life promises to extend its products to cover a total of 30 League teams. But this is just the beginning: the idea is for every person to leave this world inside his or her own funeral merchandise, like the ash-coloured filling of that pop symbol that became a metonym for its own identity. A spokesman for Eternal Life emphasises that the company’s plan is part of a general trend, since the relatives of a deceased person are becoming increasingly more receptive to the idea of investing in a product that “respects their personality”. At a recent funeral trade fair in the USA, other themed urns and caskets were on show: a Harley Davidson model, ideal for Hell’s Angels heading for their own particular Motorway to the sky, or a Betty Boop model for nostalgic cartoon fans. It probably won’t be long before the Enterprise urn or the Jack Skellington coffin appear. Up to now, merchandising had functioned as an adult extension of our immature fondness for childhood toys. Collecting had been another way of reliving childhood – sometime a rather disturbing way, like the smile of an elderly child. Eternal Life has taken a big evolutionary step: merchandising can also accompany us to eternal life. Or to hell. Or to nothing.

2. Vinyl sculpture of Walt Disney frozen
It may not be in heaven, or hell, or anywhere, but simply in its own frozen limbo. I like to think that his body, hanging like the body of the dead girl in Edgar G. Ulmer’s The black cat (1934), remains hidden in the bowels of Disneyland, imagining what’s going on up above, dreaming about us because we are very likely his dream come true, inhabitants of a global theme park hooked on the compulsive consumption of the icons of our childhood; a childhood perpetually prolonged or mutated by the fascination for subculture, design or merely ironic impact. Disney has always been condemned for being white, conservative and sentimental. Nobody, apart from cartoon fans able to put their progressive gaze into pause mode, tends to remember that the language of cartoon films took several quantum leaps thanks to him (and also his not always submissive employees). Nor does he usually get any recognition for being a utopian: Disneyland was the test model for Epcot, the idea for a city of the future that never materialised as such. An orderly dream: the “sinless city” in which the only vice is supposed to be the immaculate collection of figurines (not necessarily Disney ones) that each inhabitant would keep at home.


3. Action figure by Jorg Sacul
When George Lucas was filming Star Wars (1977) he negotiated with the studio a reduction in his salary as director in exchange for the licensing rights in all the by-products, from the articulated figures to the video games. Fox thought it had done the deal of the century, conning an unwary director intent on getting his own personal project off the ground come what may. It didn’t realise that George Lucas was looking into the future: the film and its sequels acted as a mega advertising spot able to turn merchandising into the central discourse, the masterpiece of the visionary creator. In 2005, Forbes magazine put the absolute profits generated by the Star Wars franchise at $20 million. George Lucas himself achieved his eternal life (or what passed for it) in 2002 when he became a Hasbro articulated action figure with the name

In 2005, Forbes magazine put the absolute profits generated by the Star Wars franchise at $20 million.

All roads lead to Andy Warhol: he, like Walt Disney and George Lucas, saw this future, but he had the merit of announcing it from the sacrosanct vacuum-packed territory of art.

4. Replica in wood of a Brillo box All roads lead to Andy Warhol: he, like Walt Disney and George Lucas, saw this future, but he had the merit of announcing it from the sacrosanct, vacuum-packed territory of art. It is difficult to pin point the exact moment when a seemingly frivolous joker revealed his medullar status as a prophet. It was probably when his work went from being a mirror of mass-production to being mass-production itself; art as a consumer article. Where I live there is a shop that will create your own Warhol for you: you provide a photo, they enlarge it, touch it up, colour it and turn it into a Warhol. And best of all, it’s a very middle-class shop: nothing modern, nothing kitsch about it. It’s just an ordinary shop. Like VIPS. That is Warhol’s triumph.

Kenny Scharf, Consulta MERCH & PROMO, CASM, 2006

5. Hiropon (to scale)
Hiropon, an anime-style female with oversized breasts, skips with the arc of milk shooting out from her atomic nipples. This is one of Takashi Murakami’s best known sculptures, miniaturised and distributed in a limited edition for collectors as part of the Superflat Museum series. Murakami’s work is deliberately ambiguous and makes references to many – too many – things: above all it is a comment on this “culture of immaturity” that perhaps has its capital in Tokyo, although it is a worldwide phenomenon. It is a culture that he criticises and also celebrates and one to which he consciously and deliberately belongs. This Japanese art form is the reduction to scale of future man: someone who is able to become sexually aroused by an animated drawing and who defines his life around a fetish. For human beings, aesthetic emotion has developed in the form of a toy. Maybe it’s not our business to question whether this is good or bad; the only important thing at the moment is to complete the collection. And to continue thinking about which model of the Eternal Life casket we should order.

Chicks on speed, Consulta MERCH & PROMO, CASM, 2006