… BUT I KNOW WHAT I LIKE

The Function of ‘Art’ in Advertising

Advertising is part of a system which not only sells us things – it sells us ‘choices’: or, to be more precise, sells us the idea that we are ‘free’ to ‘choose’ between things. To nourish this ‘freedom’ advertising must, like other key ideological forms, cover its own tracks and assert that these choices are the result of personal taste. As a contemporary advert puts it: ‘One instinctively knows when something is right’. In our society ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms share the same speech: for this pompous phrase could equally have leapt straight from the mouth of that most instinctive bourgeois character The Artist.

Unlike advertising, Art has a reputation for being above things vulgar and mercenary, a form eternal rather than social, whose appreciation springs from the discerning heart, not the cultural background. This ethereal notion can be brought down with a bump by the merest glimpse, on the one hand at the Art market, distinguished from other fields of commercial gain only by the intriguing fact that it successfully deals in the ‘priceless’, and on the other hand, at that equally effective cultural economy whereby anything that too many people like is rapidly devalued as ‘Art’. Classical music which makes it onto ‘100 Favourites’ LPs becomes scorned by ‘serious’ music lovers; reproductions even of ‘valued’ paintings, like Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’, disappear from the walls of the cognoscenti when they become widely enough loved to be sold in Woolworth’s.

It is on this ‘cultural economy’ that advertising feeds its endless appetite for social values. Ads are in the business not of creating, but of re-cycling social categories, relying on systems of value already in existence as sources for the ‘auras’, at once intangible and precise, which must be associated with the goods for sale. Any system which is already structured in terms of up-market and down-market is especially useful, the more so if it has a high investment in denying its own workings. Advertising pitches its products at specific social classes (carefully graded from A to E) yet, as with Art, choice and taste must appear as personal attributes of the individual. So ‘Art’ is a particularly appropriate system for ads: while appearing to be ‘above’ social distinctions, it provides a distinct set of social codes which we all understand.

For what is interesting is the degree of agreement at both ends of the social scale as to what ‘Art’ is. Art is felt to be ‘difficult’, its meaning not accessible by mere everyday use of the perceptive faculties. It is something which the great majority of people feel is somehow above them, out of reach and beyond their grasp. This perfectly mirrors the opinion of those select few who can be assured of their good taste simply by its exclusiveness.

It is in the light of these implications that the Benson and Hedges campaign appears in its full brilliance. Usually seen as an application of surrealist style to advertising, it is in fact much more: an application of social assumptions about class, taste and Art. All ads are surreal in a sense: they connect disparate objects in strange formal systems, or place familiar objects in locations with which they have no obvious connection. We are so familiar with perfume bottles haunting desert islands and motor cars growing in fields of buttercups that their surreal qualities go unremarked. (Dali’s ‘Apparition of a Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach’ could be the description of an everyday advertisement). What the B&H ads do, obliquely, is refer to surrealism as an ‘Art’ structure, and more particularly, they draw on the crux of surrealism – the assumption of an underlying sense. In the original Surrealist paintings, this sense was a psychoanalytic one, the logic of a dream. The fact that it wasn’t immediately apparent guaranteed the depth of its existence.

B&H ads like the Mousetrap, the Birdcage, the Christmas Tree (and more recently, the Winston ads) make a formal play on doing exactly what all ads do: re-place a product in a context with which it has no ‘natural’ connection, so that it takes on meaning from its surroundings. The difference is that the B&H ads don’t seek to naturalize this re-location, they play on its strangeness. The product doesn’t come to mean ‘parrot’ or ‘electric plug’. It is the context of ‘Art’ in which the product is being inserted.

And in this context, it is the very difficulty in understanding the images, and the absence of obvious connections, which indicates the genuinely ‘cultured’ status of the ads, and therefore, of the product. The ads are visual puzzles, they imply meanings one doesn’t have access to. This suggests ‘High Art’ and thereby, exclusivity. A product for the discerning, the tasteful, the few. The legal restrictions on linking tobacco with social success are brilliantly by-passed. A B&H ad doesn’t depict a social class (as, for example, Martini ads do) but implicitly, and flatteringly, addresses one, through its reference to Art and the assumed response. (Similarly, Players No. 6 have managed to imply exactly the social class of consumer they used to depict, in their imitation series which is much less ‘difficult’: while referring to the Benson and Hedges campaign, their ‘down-market’ version is reassuring, for people who didn’t feel they ‘got’ the smarter images.)

In terms of class and taste, the Three Ducks ad is the most revealing. Flying ducks are tacitly a joke about ‘bad’ taste among those who assume theirs is ‘good’. Just as the formal peculiarity of the picture is unsettling, with its distorted angles, stark primary colours and lack of realism, so the cosy lower-classness of the whole lifestyle implied by the ducks, is both scorned and threatened by the social snobbery (wrapped in a visual snobbery) of the image. This ad confirms the connection between Artistic and social values which underpins the whole series.

Quite the opposite effect is produced by the ‘Mona Lisa’ ad. This is a familiar reference, a picture that even the ‘uneducated’ have heard of. But more than that: here again, the connotations derived from its use of the ‘Art’ image exactly fit the overall social tone of the ad. The Mona Lisa’s smile is a well-known mystique, famous, like Art, for its incomprehensibility. But here we have a perfectly ordinary, homey explanation! She is thinking of a real dairy cream cake. The inscrutable is suddenly brought into terms of everyday life, and, although this is clearly a joke, it is one with very deep-lying implications, about Art, inferiority, and the relief at being able to joke about something one feels is alien. And this relief is exactly like the pleasure of letting oneself go, and having a nice (but naughty) éclair. In relation to High Culture and Art, this ad is as reassuring as a cream cake. Even the caption recognizes both the transgression of tampering with ‘Art’ (naughty) and, simultaneously, the comforting sense such transgression brings (nice). This ad draws on exactly the same assumptions about ‘Art’ as the B&H ones, but invites the response of a different social group (and in particular, women).

The ‘Picasseau’ ad, like the ‘Mona Lisa’ ad, jokes about a well-known style with a familiarity that at once disarms and impresses: it successfully combines both ends of the spectrum. Even people who have never heard of cubism have heard of Picasso and know he often painted in strange square shapes, making the familiar’ (a woman, a guitar) alien. Here it’s done so simply that anyone can ‘get’ it: the alien is re-familiarized. Yet it’s done so stylishly that it also reads like an in-joke for the arty. Anyone can grasp the visual joke – even the bubbles are square. Cleverly, this ad provides multiple values: snobbery, or reassurance. It depends how much you know about Art …

 

(City Limits, 1984)