Uneasy Courtship: Modern Art and Modern Advertising

Abstract

HISTORIANS OF ART IN ADVERTISING MIGHT PONDER THE SEX LIFE OF INSECTS. THE male praying mantis approaches the female warily. A successful leap means he can pass on his genes to the next generation, then, with luck, slip away unharmed. If he misses or is detected too soon, he is likely to lose his limbs or his head. A headless mantis can perform sexual feats undreamt of by the whole insect; he becomes a technically superb mating machine-until copulation is over and the female devours him completely. The sexual cannibalism of mantises illuminates a century of uncertain courtship between artist and advertiser. It especially captures the ambivalence of artists themselves: eager to enter the agency, make a fast buck, and depart with independence intact; fearful that if they linger too long or make one misstep, they may acquire technical prowess but ultimately disappear in the maw of the organization. The entomological analogy may be particulary appropriate for American male artists: it embodies the sexual anxieties that pervade republican and romantic traditions of artistic potency, especially the fear that art in the service of commerce unmans the artist by reducing him to an agent of effeminate luxury; it also suggests the lure of risk and struggle that has attracted many artists to the practical world of men. The artist may have more in common with the mantis than he knows. Sociobiological analogies, to be sure, are always suspect, and in the current postmodern atmosphere, this one may be obsolete. The phrase selling out has acquired an antique glaze; the best and brightest art school graduates aspire to become Creative Persons for the big agencies. And nearly all critics agree that the conflict between modernist art and modern advertising has disappeared-if it ever existed. The cruder version of this argument asserts that modernist art has always reflected the cultural style of capitalist modernization: the restless experimentation, the unrelenting contempt for established forms and values. The subtler version suggests that modernism has lost its cutting edge: as Fredric Jameson writes, what