Box Vox

packaging as content

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March 17, 2011

Auction House Packaging

ChristiesStack SothebysStack

 

A long time ago I worked in the advertising department of Christie’s auction house, where it fell to us to design their magazine ads and catalog covers, etc.  There was also a photo department where they took photographs of the consigned artworks.

As we near the end of our double week of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes—(scraping the bottom of the bowl?)—we are again resorting to Pop Art. These two photographs, each showing an arrangement of Warhol’s shipping cartons (including the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes type) are from the two major competing auction houses: Christie’s above and Sotheby’s, on right.

Neither of these packaging arrangements are the type you would see at the supermarket. In a retail setting (of course) the stacked display would be retail packages, rather than shipping cartons and they would most likely be all the same brand. Maybe you would see this sort of thing in some unusually haphazard grocery store stockroom? I don’t know. I never worked in a grocery.

What the two photos do show is the variability of permissible arrangements that these sculptures may be placed in. These two competitors are each offering nearly identical collections—although the Sotheby’s collection does contain an added Del Monte carton—but their “product photos” are very different.

Christie’s, here went in for the sort of “casually flung” arrangement suggesting a communing between the different brands. like a arrangement of furniture to help facilitate conversation.

Sotheby’s arrangement is the more daring, I think. Their boxes are displayed at alternating angles in a single stack—a pop art version of Brâncuşi’s endless column.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

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