By Carlos Alegria
I recently watched a video essay about the Alegría art style, aka "Corporate Memphis" among many other aliases.
While I understand people might be bored of it, I find it miopic to just refer to it as "the corporate artstyle" as it is merely a trend of the current era.
"I don't like this visual style because it's corporate" feels to me like a commentary towards the mundanity of media consumption.
We currently romanticize "Y2K style" while it was also a corporate style of the time; and the "Attitude Era", and Factory Pomo were also utilized in corporate identities, regardless of how fond we could be of them.
Some examples of "Y2K" visuals, popular at the turn of the millennium.
"Factory Pomo" was a very popular aesthetic style on the mid-90s, many could consider it the graphic design standard of the time.
So I declare that to refer an aesthetic style merely as "corporate" is a disservice and shorthanded, capitalism did not hesitate from applying deco or art nouveau either.
Consider the following, I find it plausible that sometime in 2040 or even earlier I could bear witness of "Alegría aesthetic" nostalgia blogs or fan galleries of such. After all, we will move to something else in due time.
This is my take: an aesthetic is not inherently corporate, only utilized to different means to which fairly we might often relate to as such.
There was even a time that even "anti-corporate" was embraced by corporations, counter-culture to be more specific. That is majorly how Viacom became a corporate giant with MTV.
The same happened in the 60s. The same happened last decade.
Anyway, while capitalism remains as part of our society, it is rather common that private interest adopts a popular aesthetic. Do not despair, dear artist, create whether be in spite or in favor of the current trend, as for when you create you can be free.
