After discussing the relationship between high culture and pop culture, he gives outsiders a quick view of the business basics (complete with chart) of ad agencies. Twitchell writes:

"Advertising is the educational program of capitalism, the sponsored art of capitalism, the language of capitalism, the pornography of capitalism. Most of all, for all the high-sounding phrases, advertising is the culture developed to expedite the central problem of capitalism: the distribution of surplus goods. The industrial revolution is usually studied from the point of view of the producer, how machines made things. But the real revolution was in how things were distributed, how advertising made things worth buying."

Chapter 2 has an informed , interesting history of ad media from print (books, newspapers, magazines, trade cards) to radio and television (especially how radio business practices shaped the later development of TV). In Chapter 3, he refers to -- and refutes -- a well-known unreality, the myth of "subliminal" ads (Wilson Bryan Key, et al); and the lesser-known reality of commercial censorship (esp. self-censorship), of advertising pressures influencing editorial content. He repeats his emphasis on our benefit-seeking [my phrasing], and how advertising research see us as target audiences to be studied and categorized; how celebrities (especially athletes), our senses, and our genders relate to ads. He repeats his earlier attacks on academic critics; for example, he recognizes that "sex sells," but denies a conspiracy. The chapter ends with a long litany of the "Festivals of Consumption" -- how advertising is so responsible for ordering time in our culture: in daily life, in the weekly routine, and our annual rituals.

Chapter 4 convincingly makes the case comparing the role of advertising today (adding value to objects) with the role of religion in Renaissance Florence ; argues that the Victorian myth of "redemptive art" remains with us today, but that there's now a blurring of commercial ads and "high culture" art , which he discusses in relation to corporate sponsorship of museums. Chapter 5 looks ahead (in 1995) to the future of advertising, with accurate emphasis on branding, but lacking any treatment of online advertising. (Who knew? Who could guess that surprising development!) He concludes:

"Advertising has become the dominant meaning-making system of modern life because of our deep confusion about consumption, not only about what to consume but how to consume. The idea that advertising creates artificial desires rests on a wistful ignorance of history and human nature, on the hazy feeling that there existed some halcyon era of noble savages with purely natural needs. Once fed and sheltered, our needs have always been cultural, not natural. Until some other system codifies and satisfies those needs and yearnings, advertising --and the culture it carries with it-- will continue not just to thrive but to triumph."

| Magical & mythic | People like Things | Academic critics | Adding Value to Objects (Modern Ads & Renaissance Art) |

"Adcult is a magical culture. In a strictly formal sense, if objects carried intrinsic value, we would not need much in the way of language. To paraphrase Archibald MacLeish, things would mean, not be. Clearly, however, objects around us don't have such value. They have attributed value, and that process of attribution is continually shifting. It is magical.

The hoary comparison of advertising with religion is as felicitous as it may be trite. I am hardly the first to recognize that advertising is the gospel of redemption in the fallen world of capitalism, that advertising has become the vulgate of the secular belief in the redemption of commerce. In a most profound sense advertising and religion are part of the same meaning-making process: they occur at the margin of human concern about the world around, and each attempts to breach the gap between us and objects by providing a systematic understanding. Whereas the Great Chain of Being organized the world of our ancestors, the marketplace of objects does it for us. They both promise redemption: one through faith, the other through purchase.

But how are order and salvation effected? By magical thinking, pure and simple. The greatest power of magic is that it is so resolutely denied as the major organizer of meaning. We acknowledge all manner of nefarious magic and have special names for it: black magic, sorcery, voodoo, witchcraft, and necromancy. What we overlook is that until modern times our ancestors also believed in their ability to convince a beneficent power to do or not do something. They called this theurgy, or white magic. The ability to coax beneficent spirits from their habitations was very much a part of classical beliefs. These spirits, be they gods, dryads, nymphs, or mythic personages with names like Zeus, Hera, Jupiter, and Ajax, became the saints, cherubs, and seraphim of the Christian heavens. The Jolly Green Giant, the Michelin Man, the Man from Glad, Mother Nature, Aunt Jemima, Speedy Alka-Seltzer, the White Knight, and all their otherworldly kin are descendants of the earlier gods. What separates them is that they now reside in manufactured products and that, although earlier gods were invoked by fasting, prayer, rituals, and penance, the promise of purchase calls forth their modern ilk....

How do we think things work if not through the powers of magic? Why should we think that ours is an age of reason, an age of scientific observation, an age devoid of wishful thinking? The days of the Inquisition, Ponzi schemes, rain dances, the South Sea Bubble, witchcraft, and Dutch tulip mania are hardly over. In their place we have the stock market, state-supported gambling, chain letters, abstract expressionism, credit cards, national debt, filter tips, premium gas, anorexia, vitamin supplements, Amway, Lourdes, horoscopes, social security, trickle-down economics, leveraged buyouts, long-range weather forecasting, higher education, installment buying, the rhythm method, UFOs, hedge funds, eat-more-but-lose-weight diets, the value of diamonds, astrology, prayer, language, and, of course, almost all advertising....

In one of the best books ever on advertising, The Golden Bough (1922), anthropologist James Frazer outlines the two kinds of magic that make up our reality: theoretical and practical. The theoretical has to do with heavens, weather, tides, and cycles of planets and is the province of religion. It governs our far-off concerns, such as what we see when we look up or how we feel when we think about death. The practical kind of magic is when we cast our eyes downward and contemplate ourselves and the objects around us. Frazer divides the practical, or nearby, magic into the contagious and the imitative. The contagious is the basis of all testimonial advertising---the explanation of the importance of celebrity endorsement-and has its religious counterparts in such matters as the relics of Christ. If you use this product, if you touch this stone, if you go to this holy place, if you repeat this word, you will be empowered because the product, stone, place, word ... has been used by one more powerful than you. Imitative magic, on the other hand, is a variation of circular thinking. Because the product is made of something, you will be likewise, if you consume it....

Once we realize that magical thinking is at the heart of both religion and advertising, why magical symbolism and language have become such a productive approach becomes clear. Once we realize that the consumption of an object often has more to do with meaning than with use, we will appreciate the vast power of the amulets, icons, images, statues, relics, and all the assorted stuff of organized systems of transcendental barter. Advertising fetishizes objects in exactly the same manner that religion does: it "charms" objects, giving them an aura of added value.... "(James Twitchell, AdCultUSA, pp. 30-32)

"Before all else we must realize that modern advertising is usually tied to things and only secondarily to services. Manufacturing both things and their meanings is what American culture is all about. If Greece gave the world philosophy, Britain gave drama, Austria gave music, Germany gave politics, and Italy gave art, America gave mass-produced objects.... Advertising is how we talk about these things, how we imagine them, how we know their value.

Human beings like things. We buy things. We like to exchange things. We steal things. We donate things. We live through things. We call these things goods as in goods and services. We do not call them bads.

This sounds Simplistic, but it is crucial to understanding the power of Adcult. Still going strong, the industrial revolution produces more and more things not because production is what machines do, and not because nasty capitalists twist their handlebar mustaches and mutter "More slop for the pigs," but because we are attracted to the world of things. Madonna was not the first material girl. Advertising supercharges some of this power.

This attraction to the inanimate happens all over the world. Berlin Walls fall because people want things, and they want the culture created by things. China opens its doors not so much because it wants to get out but because it wants to get things in. We were not suddenly transformed from customers to consumers by wily manufacturers eager to unload a surplus of crappy products. We have created a surfeit of things because we enjoy the process of getting and spending. The consumption ethic may have started in the early 1900s, but the desire is ancient. Kings and princes once thought they could solve problems by amassing things; we now join them.

The Marxist balderdash of cloistered academics aside, human beings did not suddenly become materialistic. We have always been desirous of things. We have just not had many of them until quite recently, and in a few generations we may return to having fewer and fewer. Still, while they last, we enjoy shopping for things and see both the humor and truth reflected in the aphoristic "Born to shop," "Shop 'til you drop," and "When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping." Department store windows, be they on the city street or inside a mall, did not appear magically. We enjoy looking through them to another world. It is the voyeurism of capitalists.

Our love of things is the cause of the industrial revolution, not the consequence. Man (and woman) is not only homo sapiens, or homo ludens, or homo faber but also homo emptor.

Mid-twentieth-century American culture is often criticized for being too materialistic. But we are not too materialistic. We are not materialistic enough. If we craved objects and knew what they meant, there would be no need to add meaning through advertising. We would just gather, use, toss out, or hoard indiscriminately.

But we don't. First, we don't know what to gather and, second, we like to trade what we have gathered. Third, we need to know how to value objects that have little practical use. What is clear is that most things in and of themselves do not mean enough. In fact, what we crave may not be objects at all but their meaning.

For whatever else advertising does, one thing is certain: by adding value to material, by adding meaning to objects, by branding things, advertising performs a role historically associated with religion."

Not Quite an Ode-on-a-Grecian-Urn-Thought, but: Visiting Athens in 2006, I thought of Twitchell's essay ("people like things") when I was in the elegant new Byzantine Museum where one room displaying ornamental costume jewelry (rings, bracelets, necklaces, pins and combs) was succinctly labeled: "expressions of coquetry and vanity, but also a sign of desire for self-advertisement and social advancement, inclusion in a particular group, or possession of some office."

Later, Twitchell writes:

"...most literature on modern culture is downright supercilious about consumption. What do you expect? Most of it comes from a culture professionally hostile to materialism, albeit secretly envious. From Veblen on through Christopher Lasch runs a palpable sense of disapproval as they view the hubbub of commerce from the groves of academe.

Concepts of bandwagon consumption, conspicuous consumption, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, the culture of narcissism, and all the other barely veiled reproofs have limited our serious consideration of Adcult to such relatively minor issues as manipulation and exploitation. People surely can't want --ugh! - -things. Or, if they really do want them, they must want them for all the wrong reasons.

The idea that advertising creates artificial desires rests on a profound ignorance of human nature, on the hazy feeling that there existed some halcyon era of noble savages with purely natural needs, on romantic claptrap first promulgated by Rousseau and kept alive in institutions well isolated from the marketplace
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Here is a sampling of the affection extended to Adcult by the charitable souls in and around academia. Such critical comments have become so much a part of our common culture that they repeatedly appear in collections of familiar quotations.

A considerable part of our ability, energy, time and material resources is being spent today on inducing us to find the money for buying material goods that we should never have dreamed of wanting had we been left to ourselves. -- Arnold Toynbee

Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted. -- John Kenneth Galbraith

The modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear better. -- George Santayana

Advertising is the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.-- Stephen Leacock

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. -- George Orwell

Nothing's so apt to undermine your confidence in a product as knowing that the commercial selling it has been approved by the company that makes it. -- Franklin P. Jones

Advertising has done more to cause the social unrest of the twentieth century than any other single factor. --Clare Boothe Luce

What raises the ire of these pundits is that advertising is stealing their thunder. Commercial speech, not other types of "higher conversation," is defining value for objects.

At the human level novelists knew about the defining power of goods before economists did, as the works of Austen, Trollope, Dreiser, James, and Wharton attest. The novel of manners is often the novel of microeconomics. Human gesture is replaced by interaction with manufactured objects. Etiquette becomes subsumed by ownership. Even the smallest objects sometimes assume inordinate value. Many a nineteenth-century novel-especially in America, which had no elaborated history of social and class distinctions describes at length the display of crockery, the proper machine-woven garb, the giving of a bowl, or the decor of a room. In fact, the drawing room itself was a new venue in which to display the growing collection of self-defining objects. Ralph Lauren' and Martha Stewart still trade on these distinctions.

Branding

Advertising often achieves these distinctions by "branding." Branding is the central activity of creating differing values for such commonplace objects and services as flour, bottled water, cigarettes, denim jeans, razor blades, domestic beers, batteries, cola drinks, air travel, overnight couriers, and telephone carriers. Giving objects their identity, and thus a perceived value, is advertising's unique power.

Think about it: would you spend $100 for a pair of sneakers, $20 for a fifth of vodka, or $30,000 for a car if your friends hadn't heard of the brand? As we will see later, religion is another such branding system --the original branding system. So are politics, education, and ... art. To use a modern trope: if goods are hardware, meaning is software, and advertising writes most of the software.

Advertising is simply one of a number of attempts to load objects with meaning. It is not a mirror, a lamp, a magnifying glass, a distorted prism, a window, a trompe l'oeil, or a subliminal embed as much as it is an ongoing conversation within a culture about the meanings of objects. It does not follow or lead so much as it interacts. Advertising is neither chicken nor egg. Let's split the difference: it's both. It is language not just about objects to be consumed but about the consumers of objects. It is threads of a web linking us to objects and to each other.

The real work of Madison Avenue is not to manipulate the doltish public but to find out how people already live, not to force consumers to accept material against their better judgment but to get in the path of their judgment, not to make myth but to make your product part of an already existing code. Advertisers are not interested in what we claim to want, or what scientists claim we should want, but in determining what indeed we do want as tracked by what, and how, we purchase. (James Twitchell, AdCult USA, pp.13-14)

Not a Conspiracy (from pp.151-154)

To a degree this view [a feminist indictment of advertising] comes from the academy's love affair with Marxism.

In its macrocosmic form everything is cultural politics. In its microcosmic form individuals are invariably victims. The so-called Frankfurt theorists of the 1950s and 1960s essentially argued that what we see in popular culture is the result of manipulation of the many for the profit of the few.

The manipulators, aka "the culture industry," attempt to enlarge their "hegemony" by establishing their "ideological base" in the hearts and pocketbooks of the mindless. The masters of the media strive to "infantilize" the audience, to make it both docile and anxious and consumptive with "reified desire." The lords of Adcult are predators, and what they do in no way reflects or resolves genuine audience concerns.

We may think advertising is "just selling a product," but this is not so. It is selling the oppression of consumption. The weak and marginalized, especially the female and the black, are trapped into a commodifying system, a "false consciousness" and a "fetishism" that only the enlightened can correct. Not to worry, however. It just happens that the fully tenured, universitybased critic who is making this argument is one of the enlightened.

Indeed, much of modern feminism indicates that many young women were paying too much attention in college. Certainly one of the most articulate recovered victims of Adcult's suffocating oppression is Naomi Wolf. The subtitle of her best-selling 1991 book-The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women-begs the question and gives the lie to much hope of objectivity. Had she spent less time in Women's Studies and more time reading history, she might have been less willing to contend that quite suddenly, just when she was entering her teenage years, the world completely changed.

Essentially her thesis is that just when feminism was finally liberating women from "the men who hold them back" by providing economic independence, sexual freedom, career opportunities, and reproductive control, male-dominated culture fought back through its manipulation of the cosmetic, medical, media, and especially advertising worlds to enforce the draconian "beauty myth."

.... It is not the male-bashing that I find so upsetting (well, okay, a little), it is her ahistorical economy of mind.... The concept of doing something to your body to make it "beautiful" is no more new to girls than that adolescent boys are often sent out in a rite of passage to do some kind of group violence. If you stand in the right place and adjust your blinders just so, it will seem that the antisocial and often frightful behavior of young men in college fraternities is unique to our "troubled times." But it's not. It is our current expression of something far more deeply infused with culture and biology.

Like all other myths, these bracketing events. are up for grabs. They are never imposed on an unwilling culture. Advertising is the folklore of a commodity culture. As such it articulates and redirects, but it does not invent behavior. If it did we would all be wearing Corfam shoes, drinking Tab, New Coke, and Schlitz, lathering with Sapolio, brushing with Pepsodent, painkilling with Lydia Pinkham elixirs, listening to music on our eight-track stereos, watching video on our Beta machines, and tooling around in Edsels....

To be sure, men have always been involved in matters of feminine beauty, This didn't start yesterday or even the day before. Remember the judgment of Paris? As long ago as the third century A.D. Tertullian devoted a whole treatise to the subject of female dress, forbidding women to wear certain clothes or decorate their hair. All women, he wrote, should dress "as Eve mourning and repentant." Who can deny that his purpose was to control female sexuality and consolidate male power? And what of Thomas Aquinas, who implicitly acknowledged the bargain offered to compliant women when he wrote that nuns by renouncing sexuality "are promoted to the dignity of men whereby they are liberated from the subjection of men."

Rascals have been around for awhile. And what of cultures different from ours, like present-day Iran, where the chador is used to protect otherwise oh-so-powerful men from the temptations of female flesh? And, for that matter, what was the Holy Roman Catholic Church doing with the cult of the virgin Mary?

Dark forces ("male institutions," "the economy," "Madison Avenue," "the power structure," "the cosmetics industry"), alarmed by the onward march of women, are not on the offensive, all due respect to the conspiracy and victim crowd: Catherine MacKinnon (feminist law), Andrea Dworkin (rape theory), Susan Faludi (backlash conspiracy), and Naomi Wolf (beauty myth). Women are not being systematically enervated by men just as the sisterhood struggles to be powerful.

The idea that women are so utterly victimized by the way they are portrayed in their magazines that they starve themselves and become sick has a certain alluring simplicity. If only human nature were so simple, But anorexia and bulimia are multifactoral disorders more attributable to biology, environment, and personality than to "the appearance of scrawny models in Diet Coke ads.

This is not to deny the sexist nature of much of the media, or the reflective and aspirational nature of images cast in that media, but only to deny that conspiracy is the explanation."

(James Twitchell, AdCult USA, pp. 151-154) Top

Soon merchant families were clamoring for inclusion. They wanted their banners hung, their corporate story told, their own monumental sculpture and their own stained glass, their names on the books, and they wanted this done inside the church proper. The privatization of liturgical space, called laicization, only increased the competition for media attention. Florentine churches essentially franchised space, renting walls along the aisles, in the transepts, and even along the chancel rails. Entire vestries, porches, oratories, altars, sacristies, chapter rooms, and, most lucratively, inner chapels were sold to the highest bidder. Corporate families like the Medici, the Strozzi, and the Riccardi usually had their own chapels inside the Duomo, space in smaller churches around Florence, and private chapels in their houses. The guilds too wanted a piece of this action.'

[ i. This ancient desire continues today, of course. The same laicization occurs in what we have for the modern church, namely, the university. When Penn State makes Pepsi its corporate sponsor, and Duke outfits all its basketball players in Nikes, they are allowing once sacred territory to become an extension of corporate interests.]

What makes Florence so important is that the real art of the Renaissance was not confined to objects. Donald Trump did not perfect the art of the deal. Little wonder that double-entry bookkeeping, the adoption of the florin as international currency, and the colonization of ecclesiastical space all occurred in the same place at the same time.

Meeting this kind of demand required factories. We know the names of a few of the foremen. In school we are taught that the Renaissance had a disproportionate number of master craftsmen called geniuses. Was there something in the water of the Arno? They are names to conjure with: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Botticelli, and the rest. We might understand history better if we moved the spotlight from the supply side to the demand side and recognized the bizarre confluence of demand (ecclesiastical and laity) that centered on the consumption of articles fabricated by thousands of hands, some more talented than others. Given the outrageous demand, that some of these hands would produce extraordinary works was predictable.

The artisans who succeeded did not labor in obscurity. But thousands of others did. The successful became rich men indeed, and if they could have worn three-piece suits and ridden in chauffeured limos, they would have. They did not make up their own ideas. They were told what to paint, what to carve, what to cast, and the criterion was clear: create a campaign, attract attention. Was any work of the Florence Renaissance produced independent of corporate underwriting-what the art historians call patronage --made just to glory in the joy of creation? Name it. Who labored unknown in the garret, obsessed with his own genius? Name him. Sixteenth-century Giorgio Vasari certainly couldn't locate him. Even Masaccio, who died so young, was known, if not to the populace then to other artists. Toiling unknown is the stuff of romantic myth. Although the man in the piazza might never know who painted the fresco, those in the business certainly did. Florentine artists were not genetic mutants.

Much of what these artists produced was not what church fathers wanted so much as what the congregation demanded. If a crowd grew in front of a certain wall panel, the artists produced similar panels. If an altar proved popular, imitations soon appeared. I need a fresco like Giotto's," says the Benedictine superior, as he watches the crowd thinning out in his church. I need another Donatello but bigger," says the Brandon Tartikoff of earlier times. Perhaps he thinks congregants have been engaging in entirely too much "channel surfing" between churches. Cultural authority, which seems to us as descending from above, in truth radiated from below-from the pews, from the hands holding the remote controls. In the Renaissance they changed channels with their feet; in modern times we let our fingers do the walking.

The Renaissance concern --nay, obsession-- with image design and construction ended not because of surfeit, not because there was no more space to fill, not because the baroque took clutter to the nth degree. Nor did the Renaissance end because the melancholy northerners were fed up with a church that was not holy, Roman, or Catholic. Nor did supply dry up because no new artists were coming along. Art is not a fluke. Renaissance art ended because the frantic demand ended. The weird confluence that had so overheated the market disappeared. Ecclesiastical images were no longer so important. The rise of print (the graphic revolution), the interest in the natural sciences, the market reward for producing objects of practical use, left nonutilitarian art to be produced by the few for the pleasure of the fewer. The myth of the artist as melancholy outcast, unknown, fiercely independent, obsessed by genius, working alone in obscurity, replaced the reality of artist as craftsman, as agency rep, responding to meet demand. Graven images, the stock-in-trade of thousands of guildsmen, would become progressively less important until in the nineteenth century they became anomalies, hoarded by very wealthy collectors or housed in special institutions called museums."

(James Twitchell, AdCult USA, pp.179-183)