Advertising and the state of Art — part I

  • (This started out life as a book review, but as I started adding in thoughts about the sub­ject, I real­ized that it was more of a brain-dump of my accrued thoughts from years of hav­ing tried to fig­ure out what the heck hap­pened to the once-honorable visual arts — paint­ing, draw­ing, sculp­ture. It got lengthy, so I broke it into two pieces, but I’d like to think that in the end it might be of some inter­est to the many peo­ple I know who have only a pass­ing inter­est in fine art, but would like to know what went wrong.)
    The Fine Art of AdvertisingLast Christ­mas a friend who knows I have an inter­est in art got me a book he came across in a museum book­store. Called “The Fine Art of Adver­tis­ing,” (Ama­zon link HERE) it’s an exam­i­na­tion of how adver­tis­ing bor­rows from the art world and vice versa. That’s exactly the kind of coffee-table book that a museum could depend on — lotsa pic­tures, some copy (that prob­a­bly no one will read) and a popular-culture angle, in case the pur­chaser only came to the art museum to get out of the rain (which I think was the case with my friend).

    But I was sur­prised to find when I dived into it recently that it’s a pretty meaty read. And I don’t think you have to care about art his­tory to con­sider it worth the price, though being an avid culture-watcher helps. The text has a sur­pris­ingly grand scope to it. Con­sider, for exam­ple, that in the intro­duc­tion the author gets to a point about the found­ing of the coun­try that seems to me to do a bet­ter job than any­thing I heard in high school or college:

    Amer­ica is the prod­uct of Euro­pean imag­i­na­tions: its gov­ern­ment was struc­tured on the pre­cepts of eighteenth-century ratio­nal­ism. Out of the Age of Rea­son came a coun­try whose ori­gin wasn’t rooted pri­mar­ily in trib­al­ism, eth­nic­ity, or ter­ri­to­ri­al­ity. It was rooted in a point of view. No other coun­try had ever intro­duced itself to the com­mu­nity of nations with so suc­cinct, evoca­tive, and inspir­ing a phrase as the one that became America’s call­ing card.

    “Life, lib­erty and the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness” is more than just a few fine words. It is the idea that dri­ves and defines the Amer­i­can experiment.

    To start a book about the nexus of (cap­i­tal ‘a’) Art and adver­tis­ing by exam­in­ing the foun­da­tions of the Amer­i­can exper­i­ment may seem grandiose, but if you’re going to talk about both, it’s almost impos­si­ble not to paint with that big a brush (no pun intended).

    There’s a lot that Art says to us about the con­di­tion of the cul­ture it’s in. That could be kind of a depress­ing thought to us these days, when it seems to go out of its way to be provoca­tive, insen­si­ble, irrev­er­ent and point­lessly shock­ing. But then I think a per­son could make a plau­si­ble case that Art has more or less gone mad. Art once drew its vigor and lifeblood from the virtue, vigor and God-revealing, God-praising mis­sion of the Church, but for a host of rea­sons, it cut all its ties to its own best rea­son for being and after that descended from romance to pas­sion to unbounded emo­tion­al­ism and even­tu­ally into the mean­ing­less rav­ing that now counts as Art. The only thing that Art can do now to feel like it’s being rel­e­vant is to try to take down the insti­tu­tion that gave it its best years — the Chris­t­ian Church.

    And on its way down, Art met a cri­sis. Gallery Art and the like was con­sid­ered to be “high-culture,” the del­i­cate food of edu­cated palates. Pop cul­ture — tele­vi­sion, radio, movies — was “low cul­ture,” the TV din­ner of the unwashed masses. Art gal­leries might have liked to have gone on for­ever ignor­ing the ple­beian inter­ests in Clark Gable’s lat­est flick and tonight’s guest on the Rinso-White Com­edy Hour (or what­ever), but there were a cou­ple prob­lems with that:

    • Those audi­ences were vast, and rep­re­sented a wealth of atten­tion, cur­rent thought and, well, wealth that any artist would’ve died for. When pub­lic inter­est in the lat­est Art move­ment waned, no one wanted to ignore a cap­tive audience.
    • By con­tin­u­ing to make a lot out of the high culture/low cul­ture thing, the Art world was indulging in a kind of elit­ism that flew in the face of its grand words about egal­i­tar­i­an­ism and relat­ing to the com­mon man. It took a very long time for the hypocrisy of that to sink in, but once it did, it was impos­si­ble to ignore.
    • Artists might have felt like turn­ing up their noses at con­sumers of low cul­ture, but the pro­duc­ers of that cul­ture had no such snob­bery about Art. In other words, the adver­tis­ing world had already started bor­row­ing hand­ily from Art when it wanted. For Art to return the favor was more or less a mat­ter of destiny.

    And so we have the story that unfolds in this book: What hap­pens when one of the jew­els in the crown of sec­u­lar human­ism has to give ground before tawdry com­mer­cial­ism and mass consumerism?

    Def­i­nitely the begin­ning of the end of all the bom­bast about Art being beyond the com­pre­hen­sion of us nor­mal peo­ple, which made the move­ment much despised by Art purists, much enjoyed by the rest of us and one of the more shrill of the herald­ing trum­pet blasts of post­mod­ernism. (Which is a word that some­one might need explained, but this entry is get­ting a lit­tle long, even for me, so I’ll pick it up in Part II – link HERE)


    Related posts:

    1. Becom­ing Ortho­dox by Peter E. Gillquist
    2. Giv­ing the nanny state a new uniform
    3. O Heav­enly King …
    4. Is this what the [bleep] is going on?
    5. Spir­i­tual Coun­sels by Fr. John of Kronstadt

    August 30th, 2006 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • Mimi 08.30.2006

    Wow, I am look­ing for­ward to the rest of the story, it’s inter­est­ing so far.

  • Grace

    Hey cool! Well, I’m putting the fin­ish­ing touches on it, so hope­fully I’ll have it up before every­one for­gets what I was going on about.

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