O.C. Art Review : ‘Commodity Image’ Is on the Money : The Laguna exhibition takes an objective look at photography’s role in creating our desire to spend, spend, spend.

The consume-or-die 1980s were in large part about the seductive quality of images: ads pushing goods promising to satisfy every craving; large, loud and lavishly praised works of art believed to give their owners an aura of exclusivity; a U.S. President whose greatest skill was looking good on camera.

“Commodity Image,” at the Laguna Art Museum (through July 24), investigates the leading role photography played in creating our fickle lust for objects. Organized by Willis Hartshorn, director of the International Center of Photography in New York, this show takes the broadest possible view of its subject, rather than condemning or glorifying it.

Some images on view actually helped foster the desire to spend, spend, spend. Others respond with satire, opportunistic glee or straightforward observation to the social and market forces that make rampant consumption possible.

Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince and Mitchell Syrop were obvious choices among the 37 artists, but the show also includes a few of Steven Meisel’s photographs of Madonna from her “Sex” book, a group of those controversial Benneton ads plastered with images of death and disaster, works based on the sudden market appeal of Ansel Adams, and the extraordinary upper class social documents of Barbara Norfleet.

Certain sections of the show come off better than others, either because the images themselves are so insistently seductive and clever, or because they seem less overexposed (a risk one runs with such super-trendy material). For my, ah, money, “Celebrity, Sex and Glamour,” “Photography in the Art Market,” “The Image of Aristocracy” and “Work and Labor” are the most revealing categories.

Seeing the infamous Madonna images in the context of this show reinforces their overwhelming air of artifice. The singer-actress packages sex, one of the most uncontrolled human impulses, into a rigid container of stereotypes, without an inch of wiggle room. Posing in the nude on a suspiciously empty Los Angeles street, Madonna wears high-heeled mules, an expensive-looking ‘50s-style handbag and a bouffant hairdo. A “bad girl” cigarette is clamped suggestively between her lips.

By deliberately dating her look to the Stone Age of early Playboy magazine, she and photographer Meisel put quotation marks around the idea of sex. As in a drag act, the fun lies in the contrast between fantasy and reality.

“Celebrity, Sex and Glamour” includes photographer Jean Pigozzi’s preening self-portraits, posed with the likes of Clint Eastwood and superstar model Elle Macpherson, which mimic the tiny snapshots from celebrity events plastered at the front of fashion magazines.

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The drill involves lots of patently insincere smooching and hugging, a miniaturized yet power-packed image of high-level schmoozing, presented in a form that reassuringly mimics the reader’s own Instamatic party snaps. In Pigozzi’s universe, his mere presence among the glitterati gives him a Warholian 15 minutes of fame. Of course, the fame of models is fallout from consumer culture; in this context, it makes weird sense that the blank faces whose bodies sell the clothes, and promote the ineffable greatness of a designer name, are treated as the equals of people with actual talents.

“Photography in the Art Market” turns on the amazing fact that prints made in the 1970s of Ansel Adams’ 1941 photograph “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” suddenly soared in value (from $1,300 to $16,500) late in the decade, when photography--or at least, a certain subset of the medium--was beginning to catch on as a “collectible.”

Adams fans new to photography initially may have encountered the image improbably splayed on a Hills Bros. coffee can from 1969--also in the show. In any case, they may not have known or cared about big differences in tonal variation and sharpness of detail between a print Adams himself made in the ‘40s and gave to photo historian Beaumont Newhall, and a big batch prints of varying quality made three decades later from Adams’ negative. (Viewers can compare such differences in the show--although the “master image” is hung at an awkward distance from the other two.)

Artists’ commentaries on the Adams phenomenon range from Jim Stone’s heavy-handed “Pricerise” (a copy of the “Moonrise” print with a superimposed title and bar code) to Michael Bishop’s “Aspirinrise,” in which Adams’ classical sense of grandeur bows to real-world exigencies: a smoggy daytime view of tacky buildings in scrubland, with white dots (aspirin tablets) rising into the sky.

“The Image of Aristocracy” portion of the show is its most unexpected component. Barbara Norfleet’s quietly observant images of landed gentry (from her “All the Right People” series) reveal a striking uniformity of dress and bearing. Even in the dizzy ‘80s, they kept on wearing dull, “classic” clothes, eating sparse, unfashionable food and meeting for stylized rituals at country clubs, horse farms and yacht clubs.

This lifestyle was the image Ralph Lauren seized on for a line of clothing and housewares marketed to a vastly different group of people busy maxing out their credit cards. Dave Robbins’ “Untitled (Horse and Rider),” a hugely magnified image of a polo player rather crudely embroidered on a shirt, in effect “deconstructs” the dated emblem of aristocracy that magically yuppifies menswear.

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Then there is the “power” side of wealth: the titan of industry accustomed to total deference from underlings. In Tina Barney’s photograph “The Trustee & the Curator,” the setting is a museum gallery of Old Masters, with extension cords rigged presumably for a photo shoot. A balding young fellow in a gray sack suit raises one hand as if to mollify an impeccably tailored gray-haired man with patrician impatience etched around his mouth.

In the “Work and Labor” segment of the show, whether the subjects are drones in the featureless “clean room” of an industrial plant or paper-pushers in sterile bank offices, there is a pervasive feeling of disconnection from the world--or even from the end result of a day’s work. One set of images--Sebastiao Selgado’s photographs of hordes of sweaty, beast-of-burden gold miners in Brazil--suggests that gilt may be a guilty pleasure.

Even in a show filled with conversation pieces, two works stand out as the alpha and omega of the “Commodity Culture” story: Barbara Kruger’s “(Untitled) I’m Just Looking” and Sarah Charlesworth’s “Gold.”

Using a holograph-like form of photography and advertising techniques, Kruger superimposes the classic subterfuges of purveyor and consumer. From one angle, a merchant’s hyperbolic boast (“Our prices are insane!”) is superimposed on a huge, bloodied face that seems to have been appropriated from vintage Soviet film footage. From a different angle, this image is covered by blue lettering spelling out the polite shopper’s hedge, “I’m just looking.”

In Charlesworth’s large-format photograph, gold objects float on a black background in a deliberately non-hierarchical way. In this gleaming universe, an ancient Egyptian shepherd’s crook, a Greek coin, a Concord watch and a golden bathing suit all are created equal--as stuff to salivate over, prompted by the forces of culture, greed, vanity and endless desire.

* “Commodity Image” continues through July 24 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Admission: $4 for adults, $3 for seniors and students, free for children under 12. (714) 494-8971.