How much do we trust what advertisements, marketing campaigns, and product packaging tell us about the products we encounter on the market every day?

Advertising does not simply sell products—it shapes the ways in which we understand, evaluate, and consume them. In the food industry, information is often presented selectively, creating constructed images of products that influence consumers’ food choices and habits. The relationships within the dairy industry are particularly interesting, especially in the production of cow’s milk and its plant-based alternatives, where similar packaging, terminology, and advertising messages create an impression of interchangeability while simultaneously emphasizing different values such as health, environmentalism, and ethics. The noticeable decline in cow’s milk consumption in recent years is therefore not merely a passing trend, but also a consequence of powerful marketing campaigns and changes in the market.

Antonio Kutleša’s research-based work and installation "Brown Cows Give Chocolate Milk" (2026) examines the influence of precisely such marketing strategies on individual food choices. The work takes as its starting point a real-life example of a widespread myth: according to research conducted by the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, around 7% of respondents believed that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. This seemingly absurd response becomes a starting point for investigating how information, marketing messages, and repeated patterns of communication shape our perception of food.
Through his experiment, Kutleša turns the logic of the myth itself on its head. By intervening in the diet of a single cow, he explores the possibility of changing the taste of its milk, bringing attention back to something that is often overlooked in contemporary commercial food production—the relationship between production methods, costs of animal feed, and the properties of the final product. The resulting chocolate-flavored milk is simultaneously a real food product and an artistic experiment that questions the boundaries between fact, interpretation, and marketing fiction.

The experimental process is accompanied by a video animation featuring a cow, the work’s trademark figure, designed like a character from educational children’s programming. The cow appears to explain, with an air of authority, the processes that led to the change in the milk’s taste. Yet its childish and humorous appearance simultaneously calls into question the credibility of the information it conveys. It is precisely this tension between authority and absurdity that opens up the work’s central question: how willing are we to accept information as true simply because it is presented convincingly?
The exhibition visitor is not merely an observer but becomes an active participant in the experiment. By tasting the milk produced through the experiment, they are confronted with their own expectations, prior knowledge, and the trust they place in the information they receive. The work therefore does not seek to offer a simple answer to the question of which product is “better,” but rather examines the mechanisms through which such judgments are formed in the first place

"Brown Cows Give Chocolate Milk" is therefore not an artwork about chocolate-flavored milk, but about how we shape our own perception of food, distinguish fact from construction, and accept as truth what is presented to us as such.