You thought he wouldn’t do it again, you were wrong!
Stian Ytterdahl, 18, from Norway, who got his McDonald’s receipt tattooed on his arm has outdone himself!
A week later he has had the receipt for the McDonald’s tattoo inked onto his other forearm! He’s gone supersize with this one!
He posted his new tattoo on his Facebook with the caption #yolo
Ytterdah told Norway’s Romerikes Blad newspaper that the first tattoo was just a joke between friends.
“Now I’m a living billboard, but I think it’s all just fun,” he said. “Maybe it won’t be as fun when I’m 50 or 60 years old, but that’s my choice.”
Think what he’d have to buy to have a receipt as a back piece?!
If we manage to look beyond judgements of attention-seeking behaviour and instead look at it critically, I think Stian Ytterdahl’s tattoo is a brilliant manifestation of corporate culture colonizing all facets of our life, including our mind and body. It represents the contracting divide between pop culture (low art) and high art, the two becoming increasingly interchangeable. In a sense, consumer commodities can be seen to be purveyors of original works of art. Our culture is capitalist, and pieces of art are being sold for insanely exorbitant prices, like Edvard Munch’s The Scream at nearly $120 million dollars. So I like the fact that it was a receipt, which is probably the most ubiquitous piece of corporate ‘art’. It’s also an extremely ephemeral item, so having this disposable and trite object tattooed is going one step further and raising consumer detritus to the level of an eternal icon. Anyway, that’s just my reading of the tattoo, I like it, I like the questions it raises about modernist and postmodern art, and corporate culture entering the realm of what has traditionally been a very anti-corporate world. You may like to check this out, another example of corporate art being elevated to the status of high art: http://tomandlorenzo.com/2014/02/moschino-fall-2014-collection/