I got into a heated debate the other day with a friend who is a graphic designer over whether or not advertising was art.  I guess you can figure out who picked which side.  I’m firmly on the no side of this argument.  

It started when I mention my cash flow problems from the last couple of months and he suggested that I should change careers’ and become a graphic designer, “So your artistic skills aren’t going  to waste” he says.  That statement really pissed me off and I made some reply to the effect that graphic design wasn’t really art.  I obliviously  hit a nerve with him and the argument was on.

I know this debate has been around for a very long time and I doubt I can add much to it that hasn’t already been said a million times.  I just get very tired living in a world where the only “artistic “ outlet is graphic design, especially when I don’t really believe graphic design is truly art.  I get tired of well-meaning friends trying to “help”  with well-intentioned  suggestions.   Don’t get me wrong I have a lot of friends who really like my work and want to see me continue with what I’m doing, it’s just that there always seems to be somebody around ready to seed doubts and I’m always ready to fall for it.

The old argument that Pop Art levelled the playing field between art and advertising never really held any water for me.  Pop Art showed that advertising can be raised to the level of art but failed to prove in my eyes that it should apply to all advertising.
                                   
Advertising is subversive and manipulative.  Its sole purpose to exist  is to sell some product, if it can sell you something without you being aware, even better.  To me it’s visual noise, something to try to mentally avoid even though  it may be working on me even though I’m not aware of it.

The fact that so much of our society  is willing to accept advertising as art says a lot about our consumer culture.  To confuse the two shows how visually illiterate or world has become or maybe our everyday lives are so devoid of art that we are willing to grab hold of any image we can to fill the gap.

Contemporary Art requires the viewer to be visually engaged in a way that  a lot of modern viewers simply don’t want to be.  There are so many easier forms of entertainment available today.   Why go through the mental aerobics of trying to understand art when TV is so much easier to grasp? For the most part people are visually lazy and advertising feeds off that laziness.

Art and  advertising share a lot of similar traits.  Advertising borrows extensively from art, and since the era of Pop Art, art has borrowed from Advertising.  Art requires a level of visual engagement that advertising could never stand up too.  Advertising doesn’t want you to think beyond your immediate wants.  To really see advertising is to look beyond its cheap façade, to see its inner workings, to understand how it manipulates and not be fooled by its cheap glamour.