Page 42 - Studio International - August 1966

Pop and the mass audience

London commentary by Edward Lucie-Smith

Advertising, after being for so long the black sheep (or closer comes the curse of artiness. There are, it is true,
bad child) of the arts, has achieved, in recent years, a certain advertisements which are brilliantly effective
rather eerie pre-eminence. The painters, who once upon designs as well as being clever salesmanship. But when
a time spurred the advertising men, have now become people start giving prizes to advertisements, they are a
their clients — advertising itself has become a fountain- little apt to pick precisely those where the aspiration
head of pictorial ideas. I am not at all sure that this de- towards higher things which I have just been talking
velopment has been good for the advertising industry about, has outweighed the brute necessities of commerce.
itself. They judge by corrupt criteria—those of 'good taste', for
One of the characteristics of modern advertising, as instance, a quality which often has little to do with
anyone who has worked in an agency will appreciate, is effective salesmanship.
a yearning for better, purer things. This come out in a The Design and Art Direction '66 exhibition, recently on
variety of ways: copywriters, for instance, tend to be view at Reed House, was to a certain extent an illustra-
Left Labour voters, almost to a man. But, most of all, de- tion of this. It also served as a reminder that there is a
A photographic feature for signers and copywriters often seem to be in flight from new element in the situation, which makes the relation-
Queen magazine on the life the very things which make advertising what it is, and, ship between advertising and modern art more curious
of Churchill
Art director: Max Maxwell, in particular, from the crude realities of salesmanship. than ever. Advertising designers are people with a rather
Designer: Patrick Murphy, The advertising agency is the last refuge of the creative feminine kind of talent. They are easily raped by a
Photographer: Saul Leiter
tantrum on a grand scale— the kind that prima donnas new idea or a new image. Very often, advertising has
Right used to have, in the days of Melba and Tetrazzini. It is seemed to be in advance of public taste. Surrealism was
An advertisement for also, I think, the one remaining place where people still a scandal in art-galleries long after it became a common-
Granada Television, Art retain the illusion that 'high art' differs from any other place on poster-hoardings. The reason is that advertising
director and designer:
Paul Posnick kind. needs, not only a constant supply of new ideas, but
Photographer: Matthew In any good and creative agency, an eternal struggle shock-value, something to catch the attention, and it
Brady, Copy writer: Peter takes place —between the good advertising idea, and the seldom has time to think out its shocks for itself.
Mayle, Agency: Papert,
Koening, Lois `nice layout'. The more talented the creative staff; the When Pop Art came along, the advertising men were