Most posters have impulsively chosen sides in a moral question that I did not actually raise. I tried to find out if advertising is a-moral or if there is a morality implicit in it - but I wasn’t suggesting that the lack of morality necessarily implies an evil.
I agree that advertising has the power to treat man as a canvas, but I’ve rarely seen an advertisement creating a beautiful thing out of man. Ads usually seem to speak to man on very base and narcissistic levels, driving him to do impulsive and pointless things and consider them important, realizations of happiness and completeness.
Completeness has never been so close. And so pointless.
However advertising is only a means. It might be used to very different ends. Of what can man be persuaded? Of almost anything. It’s not that there is news or sitcoms in between the ads, these are ads in between the ads - ideological campaigns in between sociological ones all littered with references to the consumer market
The basic form of the art of persuasion, the one selling specific products, is by far the most truthful of the lot. What held in Jefferson’s time still holds today: “Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper."
Violence is not avoidable - man will be persuaded, of something, of anything. He craves it… I’m not making this up. We can’t ‘stop the violence’. But I will say that since a year I don’t have a tv anymore, and I haven’t missed it for a second. Whenever I turn on the tv my eyebrows keep rising in disbelief, about how much worse it has gotten since I last checked, and turn it off when my head begins to hurt. Usually after about 30 seconds of zapping I’ve seen so much stupidity that it almost makes me laugh in utter dissociation.
The worst of it is not at all the advertising. The shows programmed around it are often ten times as disturbing in the assumptions they make about the stage of the viewers lobotomy.
Within advertisement, due to the sheer production value and the talent and will required to produce them, I see a great danger because I see a great power.
Is violence not the original “art of persuasion”? I certainly recognize that advertising is very persuasive. To the point even that I compare it to violence. I don’t see how that has to do with weakness except that advertisement is generally used to make people weak, to weaken them in their instinctive self-value and releasing uncontrolled vitality to compensate for that. Impartially I can view it as a spectacular process. I just don’t think it has become art yet.