Art and Advertising 20050121.Indb

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 Introduction 3 belongs to a set of relational aesthetics where ‘the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the real.’4 It would be misleading, however, to suggest that, in all of its variety and for all of its contradictions and contentiousness, contemporary art is received without any method of classification.

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