The Green Bottle as Canvas

Beck’s has been putting artists on their label since the late eighties—a running series that quietly accumulated into a low-key archive of whatever visual culture was doing at any given moment. The Music Inspired Art Label competition extended that tradition into crowdsourced territory: design your own label inspired by music, submit it, see what happens.

Three designers won. Marie Schacht from Dresden, Thomas Gnahm from Weimar, Franz Stämmele from Stuttgart—their work selected by a jury that included Sven Fortmann from Lodown, Francesca Gavin from Dazed & Confused, and Simon Beckerman from PIG Magazine. A reasonable panel for 2010: people who actually cared about where music and visual design intersected, rather than the usual brand consultants deciding what’s cool by committee.

The prize was Berlin—a party where The Ting Tings and Phoenix played, with Paul Smith from Maximo Park somewhere in the mix. Phoenix at that point were still riding Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, which had come out in 2009 and made indie pop feel genuinely elegant for a brief window. Getting them at a party felt like a real get rather than a consolation booking.

The label as art object has always interested me more than whatever’s inside the bottle. Beck’s understood that packaging travels—someone photographs it on a table, someone else asks about it, and suddenly a unit of alcohol becomes a small piece of culture passing through a room. Whether the winning designs rose to that level I couldn’t say. But the idea of treating a commercial container as a legitimate surface for art is worth something, even when the beer is mediocre.