Apparently a ‘panel’ has “exploded the myth that art and advertising are worlds apart“. Righty ho, that’s that then.

Thing is, it’s not so much that art is apart from society. Nor is it that art can be and has been applied commercially, as a form of design and advertising and so on. In fact, I’ve played with some of these ideas of art and online advertising myself.

But I’m not sure that the creative spectacles of self-promotional artists, or the fact that artworks have been repurposed into and recuperated by advertising, signifies that art – by default – is a commercial communication practice. Certainly not communication design anyway. Of course artists can call themselves anything they like. But, in so far as any function or idea has any semantic meaning, I think it confuses and can be misleading.

Wearing my communication design hat (it’s a green trilby, since you ask), I just don’t see  art being any closer to advertising (or design, or architecture for that matter) than many other industries.

Designers, for example, tend to be reactive and create in response to given stimuli – clients, briefs, external stakeholders and so on. It is a definition of the practice. Artists have other criteria.

This debate is to be continued of course and (as well as the aforementioned ‘definition’) much of it appears to come dowm to terminology. This is something that communication designers have found problematic with the term graphic design, for example when discussing their job titles within the communication design industry.

Coming back to the art versus advertising discussion for a minute, it seems to me that it’s another of those parody versus pastiche debates that the philosopher Fredric Jameson has talked about. Advertising obviously being the pastiche, whereas art (hopefully and ideally) deals in parody as a form of deconstruction.