Eshtine

quote of the day

On what the author dubs "profound" ads:
"Advertising of this sort is more like Renaissance art than modern art. In the Renaissanace, painters like Michelangelo, Leonardo and Giotto did not paint what they wanted to paint...Their clients were the mendicant orders of the Roman Catholic church. Although the corporate headqarters was in Rome, the individual orders had some say in how they chose their advertising (what we now call art). Competition among these orders produced some of the greatest creations of the Western imagination, in part because they never forgot (or never were allowed to forget) the necessity of drawing an audience by addressing its deepest needs."
"...What we really crave is not just material, but material with meaning...Religions tend to make this world meaningful by creating value in the next...Commercialism, more specifically advertising, does precisely that to the fungible [interchangeable, homogenous] objects of the here and now...Much of the Protestant Reformation was geared toward denying the holiness of many things that the church had endowed with meanings. From the inviolable priesthood to the sacrificial holy water, this secularizing movement systematically unloaded meaning. Soon the marketplace would capture this offloaded meaning and apply it to machine-made things."
--"Twenty Ads That Shook the World," James B. Twitchell