Is the medium the message? A new exhibition takes on the world

The worlds of art and advertising have long enjoyed a fraught relationship, but a new exhibition takes a look at how they dovetail with one another, when the going is good. "Fabrica: Les Yeux Ouverts"--on display from October 6 through November 6 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris--showcases a selection of works created through the Fabrica center in Treviso, Italy, which provides emerging artists with the backing to undertake projects that use the tools of modern media to tackle globally conscious ideas.

Housed in a Tadao Ando-designed campus a half hour north of Venice, Fabrica was established in 1994 by Benetton founder Luciano Benetton and the Italian clothing label's then-branding guru, photographer and art director Oliviero Toscani, as a think tank-cum-workshop of sorts. Beginning in the mid-'80s, Benetton's advertising campaigns--along with the fashion house's conceptually-driven antimagazine, Colors--came to exemplify in-your-face marketing at its most controversial: Ads featured politically charged images such as an arrangement of multicolored condoms to promote safe-sex awareness at the height of the AIDS crisis, and a dead Bosnian soldier's mangled clothes during the war in Kosovo. The concept behind Fabrica was an extension of that ethos: That the very same methods that can be used to promote products can also be used to promote points of view.

The pieces on display in "Fabrica: Les Yeux Ouverts," which will occupy 800 square meters of the Pompidou and run concurrently with the celebration of Benetton's 40th anniversary, span a wide variety of media. Many were also done in collaboration with nonprofits like the World Health Organization and the human rights group SOS Racisme. Among those included in the exhibit: photographer James Mollison's stark portraits of children suffering from hunger and malnutrition; and issues of Colors Notebook, a blank version of Colors that was sent out to people to fill in themselves so they could tell their own stories unedited.

If it sounds like sensory overload--well, then, that's the point. While art and advertising may forever share a love-to-hate rapport, people in both realms seem to agree on one thing: That we live in a noisy, noisy world, but some things are still worth screaming about.

Stephen Mooallem is Interview's senior editor.

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