Enemies of art?

‘Adverts are the enemy of art. We should be keeping them out - not sneaking them in.’ - headline for an article in The Guardian yesterday, the print form of which was supported by a quarter page ad.

The only surprising thing about this was that ‘art’ wasn’t capitalised as ‘Art’. It would have looked pompous and stupid, true; but not as daft as the writer ended ended up sounding, or reading.

“The drama’s hero”, he - ‘a dramatist’ - concludes, writing of branded product funding for ad-free internet drama, “becomes the product, not the character. If this is the only choice available, then I figure… it’s best to walk away. Yes I want to tell stories about our world of dizzy consumerism. But the advert is the enemy of art. And we have to keep fighting the battle.”

Here at LBi we make ads, but I don’t think there’s any sense of fighting a battle with ‘art’ - not that I’d be keen to define ‘art’ anyway. But if we’re talking creative endeavour, human expression of experience, imitating and responding to nature, etc - the usual, widely understood meanings, with or without the big ‘A’ - then I think most LBi employees would probably admit to some kind of attempt or pretence to making art, rather than destroying or counteracting it.

Not like dramatists - they’re not pretending, you see. They’re for real. Whereas ads are bogus.

There will be more on this subject presently. It’s been on our minds here in the agency this summer. We’ve been staging a debate - mainly in literary form, for all you artists out there, and also verbal, mainly down the pub - about The Big Idea in advertising. Being an almost exlusively digital house - even more fake, perhaps, than the businesses who utilise the ‘traditional’ media of TV, cinema, outdoor, radio and so on, for the dispersal of their creative, artistic, commercial output - we’ve been investigating the premises that underlie the theory of modern advertising, a main one being this Ogilvian concept of The Big Idea.

The results of our cogitations, and some of those of our collaborators and competitors, will appear in the next issue of our quarterly magazine, LBiQ.

One personal insight (confession: I’m not a Planner so I’m not sure if I’m allowed to have Insights, and certainly not without supervision; but I sneaked one in behind the bike shed when nobody was looking anyway) was clear. The processes that everyone* involved in the development of commercial art - there, I’ve said it -; and in that wide category I certainly include advertising; are merely a formal, externalised way of valuing and controlling the same processes that any other kind of artist undergoes - including those who starve in garrets (’for their art’), and who write ad-funded articles for The Guardian about how - as artists - they’d never stoop so low as to collaborate with the enemy.

*Everyone involved in the conception, production, delivery and measurement of ads, from researchers to bean counters to shills like me.