The Art of Commerce

One of my buddies from college is a poet. He also writes advertising copy. He's not like Mikey, the sensitive ad guy on thirty-something, with his night classes and terrible short stories. He is thirty-something, but this guy really is a poet.

For several years he worked the poetry circuit of fellowship-hustling, publication-hustling, writers' retreats, and the like. He was even an official "poet-in-the-schools" for a while.

Then a few things happened. For one, he got tired of being broke all the time. But he also decided that the ad biz was, if anything, a more honest way to make a buck than its high-literature counterpart. At least in advertising everyone admits that they're selling something.

In his case anyhow, that wasn't a cop-out. He still writes his poetry. And, from what I've seen, it continues to get better. Maybe the ad work will help. After all, rhythm and condensation are key tools of both trades.

In a way my friend is just living proof of the fact that, in late-capitalist America, the advertising industry is the true patron of the arts. In earlier, more primitive times the talents of society's creative artists were subsidized by church or state to serve Christendom, the nation, or even that great lost concept, "the common good." Then patronage was passed to the nobility and the super-rich who subsidized art and artists to satisfy their vanity, or to fill their surfeit of leisure time.

But capitalism is a restless, and hungry, beast that eventually demands the "commodification" of every person, place, and thing -- and every human endeavor and ideal -- that falls in its path. Today's super-duper-rich do still buy painting and sculpture. But they don't buy for vanity. They do it as an investment.

The chief means by which capitalism these days commodifies creativity is advertising. As my friend discovered, it's virtually the only place in our society where large amounts of money are expended on the creative process, in the process employing large numbers of the creative. Yeah, there are the movie and TV industries, but they're small potatoes in terms of the number of people involved. Remember, there are ad agencies in every fair-sized town. Somebody has to produce all those local bank and car-dealer spots. But Hollywood is also small potatoes when it comes to the resources (dollars and people-hours per minute) devoted to the creative process.

AS A RESULT ADVERTISING, if it could be divorced from its commodity-moving function, often becomes art. I think particularly of the Bo Diddley-Bo Jackson Nike spot currently showing in your living room. That thing, and others of its caliber, is art. To claim otherwise is to cling to a deadly elitist view that holds art to be a mystery cult, removed from human struggle, human need, or human life. If a Nike ad can't be called art simply because it serves a function, then neither can, say, the work of quilters, or those really cool newsprinted t-shirts you see on the comrades in South Africa, or the songs of Woody Guthrie.

There are distinctions to be made, for sure, between a liberating, or warming, function, and a profiteering one. But the distinctions are not aesthetic. And to write advertising off as junk is to miss much of the point of contemporary American culture.

Advertising forms the aesthetic of American life. It is by far the strongest, most concentrated, and most conscious form of meaning-making to which most Americans are exposed. Like it or not, the stuff helps shape and satisfy the great unnamed need for the aesthetic in American lives. It fills our time and our heads with well-turned phrases and powerful images. It forms our consciousness and our individual and collective sense of self. And those who might hope to awaken a deeper consciousness and a larger sense of the American self would do well to learn its language.

But in its relentless march toward the totally integrated unitary market in the sky, advertising isn't content to be only one, even if the richest and most powerful, among several media of popular phrase, image, and meaning-making. It is also taking its patron's role a step further and, to borrow a metaphor from Tom Engelhardt's essay on advertising in the August 30, 1989 issue of In These Times, "colonizing" all of the other popular arts as well.

These days every popular movie, pop tune, or sporting event seems to come with some sort of commercial deal attached. This fall CBS and NBC even turned their entire prime-time programming slates into a pair of gigantic marketing tie-ins with Sears and K-Mart, respectively. Concert tours by The Rolling Stones and even The Who, of whom one might have hoped better, are also mammoth transcontinental promotions for Budweiser and Miller beers. This despite the fact that The Who lost its genius drummer, Keith Moon, to an alcoholic death.

The beer barons have made "people's music" (rock, R&B, Latino, country) their specialty. Eric Clapton (who also has had his own battles with the bottle) and Steve Winwood belong to Michelob. And less famous regional acts benefit from grass-roots sponsorship programs by Miller and Coors.

Maybe in a free society you can't ban this kind of stuff. And it has certainly become nigh onto impossible to boycott. But it does point to the crying need for institutional space and resources in our society devoted to un-sold-out popular art.

That's the kind of thing that can only result from a public initiative. And such an initiative can only come from a movement in which reclaiming our culture is placed alongside the larger democratic project of reclaiming our lives and communities.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.