McDeath
A central theme in classical Vanitas paintings was the idea that the accumulation of wealth is meaningless—pure vanity in the face of certain death. Often, this message was encoded in the juxtaposition of reminders of mortality with expensive luxury items. These images would have been hung in Dutch homes and contemplated daily. It’s tempting to see the genre as an exercise in cognitive conditioning: over time the attractiveness of some luxury item is marred by repeated association with death.
In a modern context, the meaningless pursuit of wealth at all costs is best represented not by rare luxury items, but by the disposable, mass produced items that form the basis of so much of our economic system. Although such items are usually marketed to the working class, their production is profoundly exploitative and serves little purpose other than to increase wealth for a small number of elite.
Few corporations represent the spirit of crass consumption and the prioritization of profit over human wellbeing more effectively than McDonald’s. McDonald’s restaurants are ubiquitous throughout the world and the golden arches are almost universally recognizable. And their core business model is exploitative on almost every level:
the food served at McDonald’s in notoriously unhealthy and is marketed directly at children in a cynical bid to encourage damaging eating habits from a very young age;
restaurant employees are forbidden to unionize, work gruelling hours for poverty wages, and have little if any job stability;
the company’s reliance on industrial scale factory farming extracts an enormous environmental toll in terms of carbon footprint, water usage, and rainforest destruction;
the animals raised on those factory farms are subject to a litany or horrors and mistreatment;
meat packing is one of the most dangerous industries and typically employs low-wage, easily replaceable workers;
the company’s reliance on disposable packaging creates unnecessary litter and clogs landfills with wrappers, cutlery, and cups.
Even franchise owners are not exempt from exploitation, because McDonald’s isn’t really a fast food company at all—it’s a real estate developer. Although McDonald’s corporation certainly does profit enormously from the sale of fast food, the majority of their profits actually come from purchasing land and then renting it out to franchise owners. Franchisers are burdened with a multitude of franchising fees and royalty payments, and they have very little control over how the business is run or where the restaurant is located. The majority of the risk involved in this enterprise falls on the franchiser, not McDonald’s, because if a restaurant fails the company can simply sell the land to another developer for a profit.
The commercial appeal of McDonald’s relies, in large part, on an illusion of timelessness. Their food still smells and looks exactly as it did when we were children, and stepping foot into a McDonald’s immediately conjures nostalgic memories of a time when the world seemed simpler, more orderly, less cruel. For many of us, eating at McDonald’s was an integral part of growing up and it’s unsurprising that many of us want those experiences for our own children, also.
The unchanging/timeless character of the McDonald’s brand is echoed, in a strange way by their food’s notoriously disconcerting longevity. The internet is littered with accounts of people keeping McDonald’s burgers for months or even years with no obvious signs of deterioration or decay.
Of course, neither McDonald’s, nor their unhealthy food, will last forever.
In this series of images, I wanted to create a visceral reminder of the impermanence of McDonald’s, and similar corporate entities. The golden arches will one day be unrecognizable. And the enormous profits the company has accrued will not arrest the passage of time. The same fate awaits both the CEO of McDonald’s and the impoverished workers he exploits.
In these works, I placed McDonald’s most iconic and timeless product—the Big Mac Meal—alongside coins (the vanity of wealth) and reminders of transience (dead flowers, extinguished candles). To complete the metaphor, I wanted to show the meal in a state of advanced decay, dispelling the notion that McDonald’s food never rots. As Barthel Bruyn the Elder wrote on the back of his 1525 painting, Vanitas Still Life: “Everything decays with death / death is the final boundary of all things.”
I also wanted these images to work as a kind of negative cognitive conditioning. As I mentioned above, I think it’s very likely that classical vanitas paintings sought to degrade the value of the luxury items they presented through an association with death/decay. Similarly, here, I wanted to present McDonald’s food in the least appetizing manner possible, to instil in the viewer an association between those iconic hamburgers and images of death, decay, and rot.
