Camel Artist’s Packs – The Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society

In 2016 plain cigarette packaging was introduced in the United Kingdom, France, and New Zealand. Ireland followed in 2018 and Hungary and Canada in 2019. Even if these measures aimed at curbing the tobacco industry’s use of the package as a promotional mini-billboard have yet to achieve the drop in cigarette consumption that proponents had hoped for, plain packaging has thrown a wrench into business-as-usual and has irritated libertarian ideologues. In an essay, “Beware the Nanny State,” in the July 2016 issue of the trade journal Tobacco Reporter, Christopher Snowdon, head of “lifestyle economics” at the UK’s Institute of Economic Affairs, a free-market think-tank funded in part by the tobacco industry, claims that the introduction of plain packaging in Britain is “infantilizing consumers by stripping them of their freedom to make their own decisions in accordance with their own judgment.” He adds, “These laws could boost organized crime, hamper investment, affect jobs and damage small businesses.” That they might also save lives is none of his business.

Design a pack “blank pack”

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Design a Pack & Art Packs
Camel

As a marketing ploy and a thumb in the eye to would-be regulators who wanted to restrict cigarette pack design and cigarette advertising in general, Camel introduced their Artist’s Packs in 2006, which featured bold designs primarily from tattoo artists. Camel also produced this “design your own pack”, an entirely blank pack that smokers could use as a palette to design themselves.

Museum Malignancy - Tobacco Industry Sponsorship of the Arts

Museum Malignancy: Tobacco Sponsorship of the Arts, explores the ways in which Philip Morris has integrated arts sponsorship into its cigarette marketing and corporate image-burnishing. It also illustrates how art museums in particular have been willing partners in this effort. Lastly, it highlights examples of activists and artists who have mocked or shamed leaders of museums for accepting tobacco industry sponsorship money. (Click Here)

Creativity in cigarette marketing reached its zenith in the 1980s when advertising agency owner and art collector Charles Saatchi thought of an entirely new kind of campaign to promote the brand Silk Cut. Inspired by the slashed canvases and punctured metal sculptures of artist Lucio Fontana, the visual puns for the words “silk cut” made it the best-selling cigarette brand in the UK. (Click Here)

To see more intersections between art and tobacco view the exhibitions below.