Artists who are less commercial and have less name-recognition are lost in the shadow of the BIGBRANDNAMES. Each theme is presented with a button navigating to a one- or two-sentence blurb about the artist/brand/company (including, in many cases, a link to the artist's store where the user can purchase products) and most of the skins feature a brand logo somewhere in the skin itself. The Artist Themes library reads like an advertising pull-out in a magazine: smaller, niche artists vie for attention against the top-billed Porsche, American Apparel, Mariah Carey, in addition to other such easily-recognized names as Donna Karan, Marc Ecko, Wes Craven, Ocean Pacific and Candies (among others). Google apparently regards all its "Artists" as brands-and vice-versa-and assembled a page featuring everything from sports cars to architects, from haute couture to hip-hop bands. Thus, the undervaluing of the arts (against which artists constantly struggle) was publicly perpetuated by a wealthy company that could have afforded to pay for artists' work.Ī few weeks ago the new Google Chrome skins launched-and the result is underwhelming at best. In so doing, Google sent the message that artists, no matter how successful, are not worth paying.
Google chose artists because they were highly-recognizable and then was unwilling to financially compensate them what Google obviously is aware that they are worth. The catch: Google offered to compensate the artists with only exposure. The situation, to recap, was that Google approached well-known illustrators to design nifty new artist skins for the Google Chrome browser. A few months ago I wrote a post lambasting Google for soliciting artist work without financial compensation.
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