From Christ to Coke

A new book on icons stretches the definition too far. Unlike the Coca-Cola bottle, true icons have power and stand at the border of forbidden things

by Roger Scruton / August 24, 2011 / Leave a comment
Published in September 2011 issue of Prospect Magazine

The Christos Pantokrator of the Eastern Orthodox Church decorates a hundred ancient apses—and lives in the minds of ordinary believers. Image: © Saint Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai

The Greek word “icon” (eikon, or image) now seems to denote any thing, person, or idea that is, for whatever reason, a centre of attention, and which has acquired a significance that raises it above the flow of ordinary events. It may be difficult to put this significance into words; but the crucial thing is that an icon is common property. You and I can both refer to it, and know instinctively what we mean, even when we have no other way of saying what we mean. Such, paradigmatically, is the Christos Pantokrator (“Jesus Almighty”) of the Eastern Orthodox Church, whose unforgettable image, displayed on a hundred ancient apses, lives also in the minds of ordinary believers, and in some way gives additional reality to the Saviour whose love they pray for and whose commands they strive to obey.

For Martin Kemp, however, the religious icon is only one example of a much more widespread phenomenon, addressed in his new book Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon (OUP). Images lodge in the mind and remain there, influencing our thoughts and actions, governing our tastes and purchasing habits, and drawing on deep and hidden emotions for their power. There is the famous image of Che Guevara, adapted from a fleeting photograph taken by Alberto Korda, and used to give sex appeal to the posturing of bourgeois revolutionaries. There is the cross that gave victory to the Emperor Constantine, worn as a sign of obedience by Christians everywhere, and which is now marked out for persecution in the European courts. There is the heart, universal symbol of love, and adopted by New York City as its own special brand. There is the Coca-Cola bottle, instantly recognisable, triumphantly marketable, and never driven into second place by Pepsi, although the two products can be distinguished only by the bottles that contain them—bottles that are now made of plastic, and which are therefore joint enemies of mankind. Kemp extends his discussion to the double helix of the DNA molecule, and even to an abstract idea, the equation e = mc², which he thinks can be meaningfully compared, in its ubiquity and associations, to the talismans that spread their aura through the lives of religious people.

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Comments

Sand
September 1, 2011 at 04:24
The technology of image creation and distribution has become so simple and easy in modern life that the image no longer remains within the elite capabilities of the skilled artist as it was in previous eras. But this flood of images still retains the capability to produce singular examples which capture the extraordinary sense of certain events, particular emotions and sensations which are valuable in common discourse and thereby become useful in a universal vocabulary. In the distant past the ability to produce images and the images themselves retained a sort of awe and magical quality but perception is always partial and an abstraction from the unattainable actualities of true reality and images, no matter how detailed, are feeble representations of actuality. Nevertheless, like other symbolic representations in text and spoken words, they retain the ability to evoke memories and stored emotions to fill out the sparseness of their presentation. The human mind does not have the ability to contain reality, it deals in abstractions and images are abstractions of various details. Religious images are no more evocative than any other kind, they merely stimulate a specialized area of emotion as does Andy Warhol or the coke bottle or those little icons on any computer desktop. The demand that classical images are any more special than current ones is merely a personal subjugation to the propaganda of the inculcation of awe by national or religious indoctrination.
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Ramesh Raghuvanshi
September 1, 2011 at 10:05
Most recent Icon are artificially created by multimedia hammering on our unconscious mind.Icon of Hitler was imposed by tact ices of Goebbels propaganda Same is true about Coco cola and other commercial Icon. I think true Icon spread buy mouth publicity and that remain longer .How to recognized true and false Icon is very difficult.Most people don't use their critical faculty and blindly believed which most people believed.Judge true and untrue with help of our mind and disobey what majority says.I think good living
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tablechip
September 1, 2011 at 16:15
One more recent example of iconoclastic rage is the destruction of the ancient Buddhas by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
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Paul Halsall
September 1, 2011 at 18:12
I am sorry, but that sixth-century image is not the "copyright" of St. Catherine's monastery. Photographs of "flat art" created before 1923 do not have any copyright in the United States. Rel. case. Bridgeman vs. Corel.
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Joebob
September 1, 2011 at 21:56
Sand, the contents of your thoughts are even uglier than the stilted academic prose you expressed them in. The human eye knows beauty and transcendence when it sees it. There's and end to it. Maybe the mind "cannot contain reality"(whatever the hell that means). But your trendy, Foucault-ish theorizing doesn't even make contact with reality.
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Murray Jorgensen
September 1, 2011 at 22:48
The American flag *is* the Union Flag. You surely don't think it is the Confederate Flag!
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Sand
September 2, 2011 at 00:16
The violently abusive response to my proposal that the iconic character of images is established by currency of common acceptance and understanding and not by any rigid abstract concepts of beauty seems to indicate a strong indoctrination by propagandistic forces. There simply is no universal human concept of beauty. I am in no way an academic. I am an artist and a designer very familiar with the way the concept of beauty is extremely flexible and changes radically over relatively short time periods. What delights one generation finds no appreciation within another succeeding one which frequently finds it trite and without appeal and when new standards appear they are frequently rejected until standards move to appreciate them. To be unaware of this flexibility is to be unfortunately extremely unobservant.
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Matthew DeCoursey
September 2, 2011 at 06:52
It's an interesting topic, that does touch on some puzzling things about people's response to images. I would be happier with it if the author would set out an argument for his position. As it is, he sets out his experience of images and asserts without argument that his impression is universal. There are references to events in the interpersonal world, like the rise of the slow food movement, but there is no argument that this movement has anything to do with the iconicity of the golden arches. And how do we know that the iconicity of the golden arches has any logical similarity with the iconicity of Orthodox icons? The occurrence of the same word in a second usage is really not sufficient. The ban on images in the Western religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) may say something about what an image is to a human being, but there is an obvious counterargument: Eastern religious traditions do not ban images, at least not widely. And why is Islam the only one that has stuck to the ban, and then not consistently or in all traditions? Joebob thinks this article is too academic. I disagree. I think it is not academic enough. An academic article would work through logical implications and consider the validity of counterarguments. I think the article illustrates the virtues of academic discourse, because this is the sort of question that can only be considered academically.
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Sand
September 2, 2011 at 14:02
On re-reading the article I found it noteworthy that, although there were exceptions, the bulk of the sense of a revered icon seemed to the author to reside in religious images and that they were assumed to be untouchable tools of faith whereas things like the coke bottle were inured to mockery. this is total nonsense since anyone with a modicum of imagination can do very pointed and twisted things with the coke bottle. He somehow assumed the depiction of a religious figure actually had real connection to the actual saint or god or whatever and to debase it was a frightful action. It seems very evident he is a person deeply captured by faith and cannot accept that these images are fanciful fabrications just like any other image. He assumes that, somehow, the Mona Lisa has a validity that Warhol,s multiple Marilyn Monroe misses entirely. Frankly I find his proposals both naive and pretty much unaware of the basic fundamentals of the motivations for art and how artists go about conceiving and executing their work.
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Robert
September 3, 2011 at 00:48
Here is the problem with the Mona Lisa argument. It was only after the Mona Lisa was stolen and then became the object of media-focused general attention, that it took on the aura you assume it has always had. Before its theft, the "Mona Lisa" was not widely known outside the art world. Leonardo da Vinci painted it in 1507, but it wasn't until the 1860s that critics began to hail it as a masterwork of Renaissance painting. And that judgment didn't filter outside a thin slice of French intelligentsia. "The 'Mona Lisa' wasn't even the most famous painting in its gallery, let alone in the Louvre," until the morning of Aug. 21, 1911. After the Louvre announced the theft, newspapers all over the world ran headlines about the missing masterpiece."60 Detectives Seek Stolen 'Mona Lisa,' French Public Indignant," the New York Times declared. The heist had become something of a national scandal.
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Deschanel
September 3, 2011 at 23:02
Robert said it well, beat me to it. Duchamp's mustache on the Mona Lisa wasn't defiling a sacred object; it was more in the nature of a saucy quip at the expense of a newly-minted "celebrity". One that would surely appeal to the media of his time, after the mystery and scandal of the painting's theft; and Duchamp was adept at courting media attention with his work. It was less an act of desecration than the equivalent of a witty Photoshop job today of a picture or event recently in the news, one that amuses and becomes a meme, easily reproducible. The Mona Lisa wasn't particularly revered before the notoriety of her theft and return, Duchamp simply knew a topical subject when he saw it.
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thebannie
September 6, 2011 at 17:33
You don't mention images that have become 'iconic' almost by accident. Images that have no commercial designs, are not commodified, but are highly evocative and instantly recognisable. My favourite is the highway shield, not any specific example (although Highway 61 could be an example) but any highway shield will do. There are plenty of others.
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Puritanism and the ethics of representation « Webstory: Peter Webster's blog
October 8, 2012 at 20:07
[...] of two reviews in the same day. Roger Scruton reviews Martin Kemp’s From Christ to Coke in Prospect. Not available online is David Hawkes’ review article ‘Signs of Grace’, looking [...]
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