Kitsch, irony, and consumerism: A semiotic analysis of Diesel advertising 2000–2008
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Chris Arning
Abstract
Diesel advertising poses a conundrum for semiotics practitioners. Diesel ads are thought-provoking and seem to interrogate prevailing social mores as well as impugning fashion and consumerism. Each season's Successful Living campaign is semiotically rich with a high connotative index. Teasing out these polysemic meanings is not a straightforward task, however. This article examines in detail six Diesel campaigns from 2000 to 2008. The article focuses on the rhetorical devices and representational tropes that form the grounds for a Diesel approach to advertising. These include both a kitsch aesthetic and a camp sensibility. The author argues that the same brand constructs twin codes — one that positions Diesel as a scurrilous and insightful countercultural observer with key objections to our consumerist culture, and the other a nihilistic and ludic mischief maker that invites smart decoders into a realm of irony and textual bliss. The analysis applies a toolkit approach to semiotics that amalgamates theoretical grounding with pragmatism.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Articles in the same Issue
- The biosemiosis of prescriptive information
- Kitsch, irony, and consumerism: A semiotic analysis of Diesel advertising 2000–2008
- Modeling semiosis in Roentgen diagnosis
- The semiosis of stone: A “rocky” rereading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge through Charles Sanders Peirce
- Disability in African films: A semiotic analysis
- Beyond linguistics: Deixis, dementia, and the theatricality of speech in Alzheimer's memoir
- Indexicality as “symptom”: Photography and affect
- Is meaning information? Some thoughts on linguistic ambiguity, embodied emotion, and the making of meaning
- Double binds, triadic binds
- Symbiotic symbolization by hand and mouth in sign language
- Picture, text, and imagetext: Textual polylogy
- Metonymy and its manifestation in visual artworks: Case study of late paintings by Bruegel the Elder
- Comments concerning the artist in a Peircean perspective
- Seven short comments on pragmatic semeiotic and branding
Articles in the same Issue
- The biosemiosis of prescriptive information
- Kitsch, irony, and consumerism: A semiotic analysis of Diesel advertising 2000–2008
- Modeling semiosis in Roentgen diagnosis
- The semiosis of stone: A “rocky” rereading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge through Charles Sanders Peirce
- Disability in African films: A semiotic analysis
- Beyond linguistics: Deixis, dementia, and the theatricality of speech in Alzheimer's memoir
- Indexicality as “symptom”: Photography and affect
- Is meaning information? Some thoughts on linguistic ambiguity, embodied emotion, and the making of meaning
- Double binds, triadic binds
- Symbiotic symbolization by hand and mouth in sign language
- Picture, text, and imagetext: Textual polylogy
- Metonymy and its manifestation in visual artworks: Case study of late paintings by Bruegel the Elder
- Comments concerning the artist in a Peircean perspective
- Seven short comments on pragmatic semeiotic and branding
