Art and advertising

206 Pages·2005·6.16 MB·English

by  Gibbons

Art and…
General Editor: Chris Townsend
The first premise of the Art and… series is that art matters. By this I mean that
art is not a futile game played by a few cognoscenti in a vacuum. Rather our
assumption in selecting titles for the series is that contemporary art is crucial
to our understanding of, and relationship to, the world in which we live. Often
the first response to art, especially in the popular press, is to stress its seeming
frivolity, its surface shock, rather than trying to draw out the deeper issues at
stake within it. Yet art still has the capacity to challenge and to change us.
Without pasting up slogans, artists have important things to say about the
conditions of our times and, directly or indirectly, they have chosen to take
on some of the biggest issues in the world today. In producing this series
we have deliberately aligned ‘art’ and those perennial issues such as death
and sex which trouble generation after generation. And we have deliberately
sought out particular contemporary issues: scientific advances, advertising
and celebrity. Books published in the Art and… series will be accessible, but
intelligent. Serious and often difficult art need not equate to difficult writing
– rather it demands clarity, and this is the second premise of the series. Above
all Art and… aims to connect art back to the world.
Published and forthcoming:
Art and Advertising Joan Gibbons
Art and Death Chris Townsend
Art and Fame Jean Wainwright
Art and Home Nigel Prince
Art and Invention Jaime Stapleton
Art and Laughter Sheri Klein
Art and Obscenity Kerstin Mey
Art and Science Siân Ede
Art and Sex Gray Watson
Art and Surveillance Denna Jones
Art and War Laura Brandon

Art and Advertising
Joan Gibbons
Published in 2005 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © Joan Gibbons, 2005
The right of Joan Gibbons to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted
by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part
thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 1 85043 585 5 hardback
EAN 978 1 85043 585 3 hardback
ISBN 1 85043 586 3 paperback
EAN 978 1 85043 586 0 paperback
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress catalog card: available
Typeset in Agfa Rotis by Steve Tribe, Andover
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1. Wordplay 7
2. Art Invades and Appropriates 29
3. From Capitalist Realism to Surrealism (and back again) 53
4. Reality Bites: From the Abject to the Sublime 75
5. Tony Kaye: Both Sides Now 97
6. Wieden+Kennedy and Nike Advertising 115
7. Celebrity: The Art of Branding and the Branding of Art 133
Conclusion 157
Notes 161
Bibliography 183
Index 195

Acknowledgements
There are a number of people that I would like to thank for helping me get
this book off the ground. In the early stages of my research, several people
from the advertising industry generously gave their time and helped me to
find my bearings in relation to attitudes and approaches in contemporary
advertising. These include: Kate Stanners (Saatchi & Saatchi), David Beverley
(Leo Burnett), Jerry Ketel (Leopold Ketel & Partners), Mikhal Reich (Mad
Dogs and Englishmen), Mike Byrne, Eric Johnson and Strom Tharp (all
Wieden+Kennedy) and Natalie Clark (Gerngross and Clark). Equally helpful
were the meetings I had with individuals and organisations whose work, in one
way or another, connects with the advertising world: Tony Kaye (independent
advertising creative, film-maker and artist), Milton Glaser (Milton Glaser Inc.),
Victoria Fry (Portland Institute of Contemporary Art) and Catherine Coleman
of the American Advertising Museum, Portland.
At this point, my thanks must also go to the Arts and Humanities Research
Board for the award of a bursary in their small grants for the creative and
performing arts scheme, which enabled me to travel to the USA to conduct
some of the above meetings. As far as the writing of the book is concerned,
I am most grateful to my editor, Susan Lawson, for saving me from myself
on more than one occasion and for her good-natured support throughout.
Closer to home, my thanks go to the library staff at Birmingham Institute of
viii Art and Advertising
Art and Design (University of Central England), who have been sensitive to
my needs and deadlines, and to Boris Barker and Steve Bulcock who have
provided me with invaluable IT support. Not least, thanks are also due to my
immediate colleagues at UCE, Bob Jardine, Kevin Harley, Nigel Prince and
Peter Grego, who have kept me going (and smiling) on a day-to-day basis, as,
indeed, have my family.
Introduction
Still frequently misunderstood and often ridiculed, contemporary art
has, nonetheless, become a significant force in popular culture, largely
because of its sensationalism and media friendliness. Among the voices of
popular criticism, UK critic Brian Sewell’s strident views show the way that
contemporary art has achieved media-worthy status in the culture while often
remaining an estranging or alienating phenomenon. A profound allegiance
to and nostalgia for the world-view of the liberal humanist can be detected
in his opinions; his notion of art is partially conditioned by the notion of
individual craftsmanship, and his appreciation of art is conditioned by ideas
of good form. Jenny Saville’s work, for instance, does not qualify as good art,
because her nudes exhibit a formlessness. Sewell’s understanding of art is also
affected by his prejudices for or against particular media and materials. Bill
Viola, for example, makes the mistake of adopting the ‘wrong’ medium for
the art gallery: video, for Sewell, is an almost ‘homeless’ hybrid.1 Obviously
this position is only tenable when it is believed that knowledge, including
the sort of knowledge that art constitutes, is something that can be fixed,
universally validated and transcendent.
In these postmodern times, however, it has become increasingly difficult
for this position to be maintained, underpinned as it is by attitudes that were
2 Art and Advertising
formed during the Enlightenment. In the mid to late eighteenth century,
knowledge seemed to promise a perfection of human culture and society
that has not in fact happened – witness the breakdown of civilisation in the
Holocaust, or the failure of science or medicine to cure AIDS. Nevertheless,
that culture and society maintains a legacy in the rather Romantic beliefs
which see art as part of such a project. This position fits into the idealist
framework set out by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), one of the most
influential philosophers of the Enlightenment period, who notably argued for
a ‘disinterested’ or autonomous art, an art which had an intrinsic aesthetic
rightness, a sense of ‘purposiveness without a purpose’. This sort of art does
not depend on the viewer’s tastes but on the viewer’s ‘common sense’, or
shared cognitive ability to respond to the appropriateness of the form of the
work, as Kant puts it, to its ‘finality’.2
Yet the model put forward in the ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’ was not the
only aesthetic paradigm offered by Kant in his Critique of Judgement. He also
recognised, in the sublime, a realm beyond the beautiful that allowed him
to develop an insight into the limitations of knowledge that has a relevance
for contemporary art. In the accompanying ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, Kant
argues that, faced with the unquantifiable magnitude and force of nature, the
human subject undergoes an experience of self-knowledge that constitutes
the sublime. It is not, in the end, pain or fear that is experienced at not
being able to conceive of nature’s ‘totality’ or ‘finality’ but great pleasure,
the pleasure of insight into one’s own limitations, what is often now referred
to as reflexive knowledge. As a state of mind or being in which the subject
comes to realise his or her own intellectual limitations, the sublime serves
not to reduce humanity in relation to nature but to rescue it. To have this
capacity for self-knowledge and self-reflexivity, to be able to conceive of not
being able to conceive things beyond the reach of the human mind is what,
for Kant, distinguishes humanity.3
Placed in relation to this sort of a framework, it now seems appropriate
that contemporary art should be such a highly contested field, often full of
overwhelming uncertainties and contradictions. The estranging and disturbing
aspects of contemporary art may disrupt and alienate, but they also challenge
and test the viewer. We are no longer asked to evaluate according to ‘common
sense’, but to recognise the absence of such universal values. As has been
argued by Nicolas Bourriaud, much of what is offered in contemporary art