Is advertising art?

Submitted texts:
Is advertising art? This question involves two terms: on the one hand ADVERTISING, on the other ART. The questions "What is art?" and "What is advertising?" hardly lead to a solution, because the answers to these questions are as diverse and varied as the population of our planet. Only by considering "What makes art?" and "What makes advertising?" can explanatory statements be made on the question "Is advertising art?": Art expresses, is felt, arouses emotions, stimulates thought. Art wants to convey a message to the viewer and the consumer. This is also the task of advertising. Seen in this light, "advertising is art!"
Patrick Rinderli, photographer, Stallikon

Art was once advertising. An example from the 16th century: The client was Pope Julius II. His briefing: Image campaign for God. Target group: the general public. Media plan: 520 m² of ceiling painting in the Sistine Chapel. Budget: large. After intensive evaluation, the commission went to Michelangelo, who impressed not only with his craftsmanship, but also conceptually: you have to come up with the idea of painting Genesis with two outstretched fingers.
In the meantime, the concept of art has changed several times. So has advertising. Even if both are the result of a creative process, even if both are based on similar intellectual and technical mechanisms, even if both are strongly influenced by time and society - there are nevertheless two major differences between contemporary art and today's advertising: 1. advertising has the goal of anchoring a brand in the market and selling it - whereas the valuable thing about art is precisely that it does not have to clearly correspond to a function, a meaning, a purpose, a goal. 2. the advertiser carries out commissions - whereas the challenge for the contemporary artist is precisely that he is not only the creator, but also his own client, who sets himself the task.
Joseph Beuys put it in a nutshell on a postcard: "Whether advertising is art depends on what it advertises." The postcard is in my office.
Frank Bodin, Chairman & CEO Euro RSCG Switzerland, President bsw Leading Swiss Agencies, Zurich

Just imagine: You are strolling through some lofty temple of art in some metropolis and the latest Conforama poster is hanging next to Cy Twombly's "Wilder Shores Of Love". One room further on, the Germanic shooting star Jonathan Meese is clenching material in his usual trashy, wild manner, while the Swiss advertising doyen Hermann Strittmatter reads out the best few radio spots from the latest ADC book. In my opinion, there's no need to go to the Bible for the passages on creation, to Heidegger for those on the material, and to the Internet for everything that Google spits out for the search terms art and advertising. What's more, the good Schirner has long since told the Scholz & Friends gymnast that advertising is only art because he has declared it to be so. However, I personally like the following saying, which someone sprayed on a Berlin firewall, much better: "Advertising is sausage".
Tamás Kiss, Hesskiss, Zurich

Michael Schirner: "Painters"
"Since I was serious about equating advertising and art, I had to declare the visual arts my domain as well. In order to focus on the problem of authorship and to prove that good ideas come from advertising, I took up an idea from our Düsseldorf campaign: the advertisement with the signatures of famous painters. I exhibited these signatures, hugely enlarged and painted in oil with the original background, in Hans Meier's gallery. The paintings in the "Painters" series show that art became advertising, which eventually became art, which brings us back to the beginning of this story at the end. Thus I have created works that all come to their completion in the self-abolition of the expert and specialist. Under this self-abolition I have placed my name as a signature, claiming authorship for the whole, which in its parts has led authorship ad absurdum and proven that art is only advertising and advertising only art, i.e. both nothing special, but the highest and most sublime."
from: Michael Schirner (1988), Werbung ist Kunst, Munich.

The question "Is advertising art?" is often asked - usually to enhance the value of advertising. It is intended to draw attention to the fact that advertising can also be original, astonishing, provocative or simply beautiful, i.e. possess qualities that are otherwise associated with art. However, "art" cannot be narrowed down to a specific set of characteristics and defined in this way. (Otherwise the question "What is art?" would be easy to answer!) Rather, art is what is exhibited in a museum, acquired by a collector, discussed in a feature article - in other words, what people or institutions with the authority of connoisseurship pass off as art. Of course, this can also be something that is actually advertising. Just as it can be (and has been) vacuum cleaners, tins or urinals. Yes, as it can ultimately be anything. But this also makes the question "Is advertising art?" arbitrary - not unlike the questions "Is a stuffed bird art?" or "Is a dead fly art?".
Wolfgang Ullrich, art and media theorist, author, lecturer, management consultant, Munich

Is advertising an art?
Perhaps this is the way to approach the issue:
Why don't you open a magazine, Spiegel, Brigitte or ?
Then the question has already been answered almost exhaustively.
When we talk about ability.
Or intelligence.
Who photographs, writes texts, designs, decides.
Have they all forgotten their studies, their craft?
Why is advertising dumber than the editorial environment?
Something has happened.
But what?
Or is art perhaps advertising?
Doesn't she also have to sell herself?
Even if artists and gallery owners don't like to hear it.
So let's leave that alone.
I would actually like to give a different answer.
Let's talk about communication.
And learn from each other. Mutually.
From film. From the theater. From dance. From directing. Of the visual arts, the sculptors.
About literature. The photographers. Of designers. From graphic designers.
And of course the advertisers. The ones who still have some attitude.
Craftsmanship would almost be enough for me.
Modest as I have become.
Thomas Feicht, ex-advertiser and re-designer, Chairman of the Board of the German Advertising Museum, Frankfurt am Main

The answer to the question of whether advertising is art is a definite no-but. It is and remains a commercial profession, even if the most talented in it occasionally succeed in creating commissioned works that gain cultural significance beyond the day. Which is why posters by Niklaus Troxler and the "Personalities" series of advertisements by Vitra hang in the Museum of Modern Art in New York (at least in the Design Section). Because outstanding advertising can develop an affinity with art, Federico Fellini shot commercials for Campari and Martin Scorsese for Armani - and advertising film directors such as Ridley Scott and David Lynch switched sides. Helmuth Newton photographed for Rolex, Tomi Ungerer drew for Bonduelle, Keith Haring created Absolut ads - and the commercial artist Andy Warhol immortalized brand icons. However, advertising cannot be declared to be art in its entirety, even if Michael Schirner tried to do so in the 1980s.
Jean Etienne Aebi, Creative Consult, Zurich

In our era, I associate the term art first and foremost with independence. Whatever creative products are created in the process do not primarily follow any dictates, but are a free, creative act. The marketing of works of art is a purely commercial purpose, which advertising, in contrast to art, pursues from the outset. Advertising is dependent on the favor of the client and can be an extremely sophisticated way of wooing consumers, provided that the execution of the advertising material is skillfully implemented and the content of the advertising message is based on a good concept. Advertising is therefore not art, but at best an art of seduction.
Trix Engeler, visual design Zone Zero, Bern

Advertising is NEVER art
At a time when beauty misses are presented like Milka cows, when everything is being mashed up with everything else in the media, people tend to neglect the simplest insights. When a lady or a gentleman gets up in the morning to do advertising, they are doing it on assignment. They only move their butts because they have a client. Advertising is a service, even if advertisers have always wanted to stumble up the prestige ladder to art because they suffer most from their purpose-bound rather than purpose-free creativity. They would also like to be creative artists (God knows there are enough ambitious, failed examples of wannabe artists among advertisers ...).
In contrast to all this, an artist has to reinvent his existence every morning; he is both his own contractor and client. It's as simple as that.
I think it's great that advertising has been borrowing from art in a refreshingly shameless way for 100 years and copying everything, really everything. I also think it's great that advertising finds its way into galleries and museums. But that doesn't make advertising art. But it is entertaining. That's enough, and it's hardly okay, is it?
Walter Keller, publicist and curator, Zurich

Advertising can attempt to achieve the most artistic character possible in various ways. In some cases, it makes use of art, working with artistic elements and creative forms. As in graphic design, illustrations or the creation of new fonts. It can often be observed how advertising is oriented towards art, how it allows itself to be influenced and guided by it. And although the two genres are similar in certain respects, there are clear contrasts between them. The most important difference between advertising and art lies less in expression than in context. Advertising is always purpose-driven - it aims to sell/inform. Art is to a certain extent free of predetermined functions, its statements and goals are diverse and changeable. In addition, art can be the process of creation itself. In advertising, on the other hand, it is the result and its effect that count. And to achieve this, advertising must ultimately be conceptual and easy to understand. Not so with art - the more complex it is and the more room for interpretation it leaves, the more interesting it becomes.
Thom Pfister, Creative Director at Cosmic, Bern

Art and culture in general must not degenerate into a product. Art is also not the aesthetically pleasing, the seductively beautiful. Art is a way of opening up the world and experiencing it through the senses, triggering thought processes that carry us further, engage us inwardly and cause unrest. Art can outwardly resemble advertising, even quote it, but, like Warhol's tins, it questions the self-evident, one-dimensional view and turns it into a cult object that attacks the absurdity of our current food consumption.
Advertising often draws visual or even conceptual approaches from the visual arts in order to draw attention to a product in a targeted manner. In the case of product advertising, this reduces the message to "Buy me!".
Oliviero Toscani's photographs for Benetton or currently for no-l-ita are interesting. They are messages against anorexia, against war, against oil spills, which he only draws with the client's logo. It is precisely this appropriation of a humane message by product advertising that creates a provocation, an unholy alliance. That comes very close to my definition of art.
Reinhard Manz, video designer and lecturer in art and visual communication at the University of Art and Design, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Basel

DESIGN COMPETITION "IS ADVERTISING ART?"
Advertising Week has not only encouraged authors to think about whether advertising is art. To accompany the event, we joined forces with the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) to hold a competition for art and design students on the same topic. Its aim: in addition to texts, images should also provide very individual answers to our question.
The jury - Markus Gut (Advico Young & Rubicam, board member of ADC Switzerland), Pius Walker (Walker Werbeagentur), Heike Pohl (Head of Communication ZHdK), Peter Vetter (Head of Visual Communication ZHdK, owner of the agency Coande) and the entire Werbewoche editorial team - assessed the unfortunately small number of entries and decided to award neither a first nor a second place in the competition. Janine Zundel achieved third place with the illustrated subject "Sale". Zundel is studying fine arts at the ZHdK and her prize is a one-year subscription to Werbewoche. Zundel's work quotes Robert Indiana's "Love". By replacing "Love" with "Sale", the artwork is transformed into a striking advertising motif. The work highlights the proximity of advertising and art.

Idea and realization: Anne-Friederike Wilhelm