selected quotes on advertising

Advertising has lost its power to put a new brand name into the mind. Advertising has no credibility with consumers, who are increasingly skeptical of its claims and whenever possible are inclined to reject its messages.

To be effective, advertising doesn’t need creativity. It needs credibility.

When a communication technique loses its functional purpose, it turns into an art form.

The goal of traditional advertising is to not to make the product famous. The goal of traditional advertising is to make the advertising famous. Instead of creating sales value, traditional advertising attempts to create talk value.

Advertising expenditures are often like legal expenditures. Both can be negative indicators. A company with big legal bills is not necessarily a company on the way up.

The true function of advertising is to reinforce an existing perception in the mind.

The best advertising programs have an “I knew that before, but I’m glad you reminded me” quality. “A diamond is forever,” DeBeers’ long-running campaign, is in that category. Rather than being information-laden, the best advertising programs are usually emotion-laden (the cheerleading analogy).

- Al Ries

to become a great artist, you must create a category

Branding in art follows the same principles as branding in marketing. You become a famous artist (or a famous product) by being first in a new category. Over time art critics give the new category a name and associate it with the painter who pioneered the category. Sensationalism and Damien Hurst, for example. Some additional examples:

• Impressionism—Claude Monet

• Pointillism—Georges Seurat

• Expressionism—Vincent van Gogh

• Cloisonnism—Paul Gauguin

• Naive Painting—Henri Rousseau

• Fauvism—Henri Matisse

• Cubism—Pablo Picasso

• De Stijl or Neoplasticism—Piet Mondrian

• Action Painting—Jackson Pollock

• Kinetic Art—Alexander Calder

An artist can't get famous by painting in the style of Picasso. And an automobile can't get famous by being designed in the style of a Porsche. Each is an original. Each is creative in the usual definition of the word.

modern art is not about beauty, but theory

Much modern art comments on the nature of representation, gender roles, Western and non-Western cultures, and, of course, art itself. Art blends into philosophy, then, and good art might give pleasure for the same reason that good philosophy does.

interplay between pain and safety in narrative

Safety help us solve a long-standing puzzle of fictional pleasure, one that was beautifully summarized by David Hume in 1757:

It seems an unaccountable pleasure which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more they are delighted with the spectacle. . . . They are pleased in proportion as they are afflicted, and never are so happy as when they employ tears, sobs, cries, to give vent to their sorrow, and relieve their heart, swollen with the tenderest sympathy and compassion.

Hume is marveling at the fact that viewers of a tragedy get pleasure from emotions that are normally not good ones to have, such as sorrow, terror, and anxiety—the more of these emotions they get, the happier they are.

Fictional narrative appeals to us because ultimately we are safe from the dangers that afflict the characters. But indeed it is pleasurable and exciting because though we are safe, we are not in total control of what we experience in the narrative. And the lack of control and suspense is exactly what makes it pleasurable.

However it is important that we do have control over the intensity of the pain. The lover of spicy foods needs to have power over what's going into her mouth; the horror-movie fan gets to choose the movie and is free to close his eyes or turn his head. And in sadomasochism (S/M) it's critical for the person experiencing the M to have some sort of signal that means Stop and for the person doing the S to immediately respond. The signal is sometimes called, appropriately enough, a "safe" word.

Thus masochism isn't really about pain and humiliation, it's about suspense and fantasy. Control is essential and this is what makes masochistic pleasure so different from ordinary pleasure. In a disturbing discussion, the writer Daniel Bergnci describes how a horse buyer named Elvis chose to be basted with honey and ginger, tied to a metal pole, and roasted on a spit for three and a half hours. This is a lot of pain. My bet, though, that if Elvis woke up one morning, stepped out of bed, and badly stubbed his toe, he wouldn't enjoy it at all, because it is not what he signed up for.

The ultimate test case here is going to the dentist. One article on sadomasochism describes a woman with a high need for pain in S/M sessions with her boyfriend, but who hated going to the dentist. The boyfriend tried to get her to construe a dental exam as an erotic masochistic adventure, but failed. There was no getting around the fact that the dentist was necessary pain, in something she chose.

- Paul Bloom

Imagination is Reality Plus

Imagination is Reality Lite--a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky, or too much work.

If you enjoy winning the Word Series of Poker, flying around Metropolis, or making love to a certain someone, then you can get some limited taste of these pleasures by closing your eyes and imagining these experiences.

But in some sense, unreal events can be more moving than real ones, similar to how artificial sweeteners can be sweeter than sugar. There are three reasons for this:

First, fictional people tend to be wittier and more clever than friends and family, and their adventures are usually much more interesting. I have contact with the lives of people around me, but these people tend to be professors, students, neighbors, and so on. This is a small slice of humanity, and perhaps not the most interesting slice. My real world doesn't include an emotionally wounded cop tracking down a serial killer, a hooker with a heart of gold, or a wisecracking vampire. As best I know, none of my friends has killed his father and married his mother. But I can meet all of those people in imaginary worlds.

Second, life just creeps along, with long spans where nothing much happens. The O.J. Simpson trial lasted months, and much of it was deadly dull. Stories solve this problem—as the critic Clive James once put it, "Fiction is life with the dull bits left out." This is one reason why Friends is more interesting than your friends.

Finally, the technologies of the imagination provide stimulation of a sort that is impossible to get in the real world. A novel can span birth to death and can show you how the person behaves in situations that you could never otherwise observe. In reality you can never truly know what a person is thinking; in a story, the writer can tell you.

Such psychic intimacy isn't limited to the written word. There are conventions in other artistic mediums that have been created for the same purpose. A character in a play might turn to the audience and begin a dramatic monologue that expresses what he or she is thinking. In a musical, the thoughts might be sung; on television and in the movies, a voice-over may be used. This is commonplace now, but it must have been a revelation when the technique was first invented, and I wonder what young children think when they come across this for the first time, when they hear someone else's thoughts expressed aloud. It must be thrilling.

As another case of intimacy, consider the close-up. Certainly voyeurism has long been a theme of movies, from Rear Window to Disturbia, but the technique of film itself offers a unique way to satisfy our curiosity about the minds of others. Where else can you look full into someone's face without having the person look back at you? "Some viewers thrill to the prospect of views into the bedroom and bathroom," the philosopher Cohn McGinn writes, "but the film viewer can get even closer to the private world of his subject (or victim) —to his soul."

So while reality has its special allure, the imaginative techniques of books, plays, movies, and television have their own power. The good thing is that we do not have to choose. We can get the best of both worlds, by taking an event that people know is real and using the techniques of the imagination to transform it into an experience that is more interesting and powerful than the normal perception of reality could ever be. The best example of this is an art form that has been invented in my lifetime, one that is addictively powerful, as shown by the success of shows such as The Real World, Survivor, The Amazing Race, and Fear Factor. What could be better than reality television?

beauty as a sexist tool

Early on, I was in love with beauty. I don't feel less because I'm in the presence of a beautiful person. I don't go [imitates crying and dabbing tears], "Oh, I'll never be that beautiful!" What a ridiculous attitude to take!—the Naomi Wolf attitude. When men look at sports, when they look at football, they don't go [crying], "Oh, I'll never be that fast, I'll never be that strong!" When people look at Michelangelo's David, do they commit suicide? No. See what I mean? When you see a strong person, a fast person, you go, "Wow! That is fabulous." When you see a beautiful person: "How beautiful." That's what I'm bringing back to feminism. You go, "What a beautiful person, what a beautiful man, what a beautiful woman, what beautiful hair, what beautiful boobs!"

- Camilla Paglia

expanded consciousness

…I feel that the Sixties have not been fully understood. That is, the Sixties were looking for a fully expanded consciousness, and that's what the drugs were doing. The drugs were a means for the Sixties to expand the mind. But unfortunately the drugs turn on you. Drugs turn on you. And I think that that was one of the problems of my generation, the loss of the visions and the knowledge obtained by the most daring members of my generation through their drug experiences. They damaged their brains, and they never came back. In fact, Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac said a few months ago on Entertainment Tonight about the founders of that band that he feels very lucky to be in good condition, because when he goes to see them—he went like this [knocks on forehead]— "They're not the same people I knew once." And I think that's true of many people I know. Some of the most brilliant minds I know did not continue in academe, the ones I talk to still. The drugs gave vision, but they deprived the person of the ability to translate those visions into material form. I feel lucky I never was attracted to drugs. I am an addict of my own hormones, obviously, my own adrenalines! So, I thank God, that's why I'm alive today to be telling the story, or trying to tell the story.

So what I'm saying is that what happened in the Sixties, "the mind's liberation" in the Sixties, was something that has never been fully documented. The psychedelic element of the Sixties is a joke today, like Donovan or tie-dye shirts and so on. I'm saying it was no joke, okay? I'm saying that that was one of the most creative moments in Western history, the moment of that clash between Western religion and Eastern religion. I'm not a practicing Hindu, I'm not a practicing Buddhist, I'm not a practicing Catholic. But for me as a Catholic that coming together of all those world-religions at that moment was profoundly liberating. I feel that we hear it in Jimi Hendrix's guitar, we hear it in the music of the Sixties. That story has never been fully told. I want to do that. I can sense in my students for the last five years, I've been sensing, when I talk about the Sixties to my students, they all are listening, they're listening very intently. Something is happening. The whole Sixties thing is returning through the students of today. I feel very, very hopeful about the end of the century and the millennium, very hopeful.

- Camilla Paglia

in draft: asian art

For many in China, marriage is about social obligation, not a matter of personal love, which is a Western idea. Similarly, perspective is abnormal in non-Western traditions of art. Perspective assumes that the human eye is the measure of the world.

avant-garde art

At the time, Manet’s Olympia was extremely controversial and was rejected by the Salon establishment. Because the nude is wearing small items of clothing: the orchid in her hair, a bracelet, a ribbon around her neck, and mule slippers, these items accentuated her nakedness, comfortable courtesan lifestyle and sexuality. The orchid, upswept hair, black cat, and bouquet of flowers were all recognized symbols of sexuality at the time. This modern Venus' body is thin, counter to prevailing standards; the painting's lack of idealism rankled viewers who noticed it despite its placement, high on the wall of the Salon. A fully-dressed black servant is featured, exploiting the then-current theory that black people were hyper-sexed. That she is wearing the clothing of a servant to a courtesan here, furthers the sexual tension of the piece.

The flatness of Olympia is inspired by Japanese wood block art. Her flatness serves to make her more human and less voluptuous. Her body as well as her gaze is unabashedly confrontational. She defiantly looks out as her servant offers flowers from one of her male suitors. Although her hand rests on her leg, hiding her pubic area in a "frog" gesture-also another sex symbol, the reference to traditional female virtue is ironic; a notion of modesty is notoriously absent in this work.

Olympia immediately launched responses. Caricatures, sketches, and paintings, all addressed this nude. Artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, and Claude Monet all appreciated the painting's significance.

Similarly, Mapplethorpe's sadomasochistic photos were controversial when they first came out. It can be argued that Mapplethrope’s photos had a similar effect on the art crowd that Manet's Le Deeuner sur l'herbe had with the Salon establishment. While rosy nudity was permissible in academic Salon paintings of Greek and Roman themes, the fiat, sallow flesh tones of Manet's nude female picnicker disturbed first viewers by a harsh contemporary realism and immediacy. There is no attempt to soften or idealize. This sexual flesh is frankly available and unromanticized. The casual air with which Manet juxtaposes brazen open-air nudity with the raffish workaday costume of the two young intellectuals, lost in discourse, is exactly the tone of many of Mapplethorpe's photos, where libertines pose in relaxed moods amid the bizarre discontinuities of their sexual underworld. The original shock of Manet's painting is surely reproduced, with the greater explicitness of our age, in Mapplethorpe's extraordinary photograph, Man in Polyester Suit, with its large black penis poking from an otherwise fully clothed torso. Finally, Manet goaded respectable sensibilities by the cool, appraising look on the face of his nude woman, who, like his self-possessed courtesan Olympia, meets our eyes without apology or embarrassment. She is practical, efficient, a bawdy woman of the world who knows her market value. She has, I submit, the same unsentimental sexual efficiency as Mapplethrope’s jaunty sadomasochists.

Mapplethrope’s distinction at the time was that he revived the idea of the avant-garde at a moment when it seemed buried forever. The avant-garde tradition was terminated in the Sixties by pop art, which closed the gap between high and low culture. The art world since then had, in my view, sunk into naked hucksterism and puerile mini-fads, a toy-train rat race of mediocrity and irrelevance. American creative energy was flowing instead into popular culture, which was sweeping the world.

- Camille Paglia

modern poetry

Poetry in its traditional role of communicating ideas became obsolete with the invention of the printing press. Before the age of the printed book, poetry was used to pass along stories from one generation to the next. It's much easier to remember a story in rhyme than one in prose and then retell it to others.

Poetry may be just as popular today as it was in Homer's time. The difference is that today poetry is an art form. Its communication function has been lost. Most authors do not use poetry these days to pass along information in verbal form. They use prose because printed books allow text to be easily passed to future generations.

Hence, because poetry is now an art form, its objective value can no longer be determined based on its communicative value. Whether the reader understands what is going on in a poem doesn't matter. The only thing that matters now is the poet's self-expression, even if it doesn't make sense to the reader. The audience of a poem is no longer the reader, but the poet.

In fact, serious poets these days have made their works purposely difficult to understand. This is done in order to show that they are elevating themselves above the common bourgeoisie. Poetry is now about distinction and reflexive performance, not communication.

symbolist poetry

For the past fifty years, serious poets have made their works purposely difficult to understand. This was done in order to show that they are elevating themselves above the common petty bourgeoisie.

This happened because poetry in its traditional role of communicating ideas became obsolete with the invention of the printing press. Before the age of the printed book, poetry was used to pass along stories from one generation to the next. It's much easier to remember a story in rhyme than one in prose and then retell it to others.

Poetry may be just as popular today as it was in Homer's time. The difference is that today poetry is an art form. Its communication function has been lost. Most authors do not use poetry these days to pass along information in verbal form. They use prose because printed books allow text to be easily passed to future generations.

Hence, because poetry is now an art form, its objective value can no longer be determined based on its communicative value. Whether the reader understands what is going on in a poem doesn't matter. The only thing that matters now is the poet's self-expression, even if it doesn't make sense to the reader. The audience of a poem is no longer the reader, but the poet.

Painting is dead!

Painting is dead even though painting is more popular today that it ever was.

When it comes to painting, its "death" is not the death of painting itself, but the death of its function as a representation of reality.

A camera is infinitely better at depicting reality than any painter.

How do you measure the value of a candle? You can't measure its value by light output, since the candle has lost its function as JC of lighting a room. The years that followed Thomas Alva invention of the incandescent lamp might have been called "the fall of the candle and the rise of the lightbulb."

Yet every night all over America millions of candles are burning. No romantic dinner is complete without candles on the table. Individual candles are sold for $20 or $30 each, much more than a lightbulb. Unlike an electric bulb, the value of a candle has no relationship to its light output. Like the fireplace and the sailing ship, the candle has lost its function and turned into art.

Every form of artwork has its passionate defenders. They will strenuously argue over the value of an individual piece of artwork because there isn't an objective way to measure its value.

Before the age of photography, painting was used to communicate the liknesses of kings and queens, princes and princesses, throughout a kingdom. Paintings also let the next generation know what previous generations looked like. Before the age of photography, Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and other famous artists invariably painted in a realistic style.

Painting is just as popular today as it was in Rembrandt's time. Only today painting is an art form almost totally divorced from reality. As photography gradually assumed the visual communication role, painting turned abstract and became art.

An inflated price is one of the indicators that a discipline has become an art form. When your great-great-grandfather had his portrait painted for posterity by the local artist, he probably paid for the work by the hour, at a modest hourly rate. Now that painting is an art form, the sky's the limit.

A decade ago Portrait of Dr. Gachet by Vincent van Gogh went to a Japanese buyer for $82.5 million. If Dr. Gachet had wanted to let his descendants know what he looked like, he could have had a photograph made and saved someone quite a few dollars.

Art has no function; therefore art has no limit on what it is worth. Art is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Interestingly enough, that price depends primarily on the publicity a painting has received in the media, not on the amount of advertising run by Sotheby's or Christie's. Sculpture was once used to create icons or gods. Now that most people no longer believe in stone, brass, or wood gods, sculpture has become an art form. No park in America would be complete without a generous assortment of metal or stone objects, but few people worship them. Sculpture is now art.

Like sculpture, painting, and poetry, advertising is taking the same path. "Advertising," said Marshall McLuhan, "is the greatest art form of the twentieth century"

Not only pundits like McLuhan but also top-level advertising people working in the trenches are making the art connection. Mark Fenske, a highly regarded advertising copywriter known for his work on Nike and other brands, says, "It may be the most powerful art form on earth." Advertising legend George Lois entitled his magnum opus, The Art of Advertising: George Lois on Mass Communications.

Major museums around the world house permanent collections of advertisements. Absolut vodka posters are framed and hung on walls like paintings. An exhibition of Ivory soap ads is on display at the Smithsonian; Coke commercials are in the Library of Congress, and the Museum of Modern Art owns a collection of TV spots.

Walk into the offices of virtually any advertising agency in the world and look at the walls. You would think you're in an art museum—wall after wall of advertisements set in impressive mattes and expensively framed.

Hold the phone, you might be thinking. Agencies are just exhibiting samples of their work. Maybe so, but lawyers don't frame copies of their finest briefs. Nor do doctors exhibit pictures of their most brilliant surgeries. We have never visited any advertising agency and seen framed sales charts for the agency's clients.

Advertising is dead!

When a communication technique loses its functional purpose, it turns into an art form.

spiritual nature of music

What is essential is that music takes us out of ourselves. It allows us to escape from our worries and desires. It transports us to a larger universe and forges a community with fellow listeners.

Fame

What is renown? A gleam of transient light,
That soon an envious cloud involves in night,
While passing Time's malignant hands diffuse
On many a noble name pernicious dews.

Petrarch speaks disparagingly about fame as a measure of being good. His criterion is permanence. (Fame is assume to be transitory).

art is hard

Nothing is of more use to man than the arts which has no utility.

- Ovid

Modern life puts us in a sort of double bind. An enormously stressful, constantly changing work and personal life is coupled with an unprecedented amount of "leisure" time. This often leaves little or no mental energy for consumption in each "free" hour. Therefore, we quite reasonably seek to fill much of our leisure time with light entertainments: things that will occupy and divert us. Although these entertainments may well have some aesthetic value, that is not why we choose them and it is not the way we are using them. A deep aesthetic experience of even the most accessible art is exhausting and consuming. Glancing at the paintings in an art exhibition or playing Mozart as background music is perhaps entertainment, but the experience is not the experience of art.

You may at this point quite reasonably say, "But I have, at least occasionally, made such an effort and I still didn't like it." How much is enough effort before I call the supposed experts' bluff?

By the time you can clearly remember details about works in a given genre, when you can compare and contrast them to other more or less closely related works, you are at least seeing the aesthetic object not only through its deviation from your expectations. If by that point the genre or style of work is still unsatisfying, it may not be for you. As universal as I believe human aesthetics to be, we are all still very different individuals. Each of us has been shaped by particular endowments and experiences. Some of us may simply be lactose intolerant when it comes to a given type of expression. I suspect, though, that once you have explored a few kinds of cuisine you may start to see what one might love even in dishes that may be too spicy for you.

I believe that the investment of time it may take to explore something really new rewards one with enormous gains. Even more than reconsidering the works you love, exploring a whole new artistic terrain is a staggeringly powerful experience. I am tempted to cite the studies about greater stimulation increasing the production of new neurons in rat brains, but that's not really the point.

If all you need to do is take a walk, a treadmill or a small park will do. But we need places like Yellowstone, Patagonia, or the Galapagos to show us the extraordinary range of nature's possibilities. So, too, our aesthetic sense can be adequately exercised most of the time with the stimulation of entertainment we enjoy and the discoveries of everyday existence. But every so often, when you've saved up your pennies and energies and want to go someplace extraordinary, you're willing to put up with the discomfort and inconvenience of traveling so you can go to someplace strange and new. That's the goal of subsidized art - to provide those really exotic locales that you may never see but that can make you dream by just being out there.

- Joshua Fineberg

de chirico - longing

Whether we realize it or not, simply to be human is to long for release from mundane existence, with its confining walls of finitude and mortality