Art in the Age of Mass Media by John A. Walker

Author:John A. Walker [Walker, John A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, Criticism & Theory
ISBN: 9780745317441
Google: 93RPAAAAMAAJ
Amazon: 0745317448
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2001-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

60. John Stezaker, Image from the ‘Underworld’ series, 1984.

Photo-collage, 53 × 25.3 cm. Reproduced courtesy of the artist. J. A. Walker Collection.

Art, Advertising and Billboards

Adverts about the visual arts generally appear in specialist art journals, listings magazines and in information leaflets and street posters – they almost never appear on television. Simon Linke and Jeff Koons were two artists who made the advertising of art their creative concern during the 1980s. Simultaneously, other artists imitated the practice of advertisers by using billboards and electronic Spectacolor signs to make their work more widely known.

Although many fine artists look down upon advertising as an applied art, those who exhibit in private and public galleries are heavily dependent upon it for publicity purposes. Glossy art magazines contain a significant number of pages carrying adverts which often consist of nothing but the names of a gallery and a male artist. Linke, a British neo-conceptual painter exhibiting at the Lisson Gallery in the mid 1980s, seized upon this fact in order to make sardonic, elegant paintings of the adverts appearing in the influential American journal Artforum. The latter’s square format was one factor that influenced his choice. Linke’s hand-painted lettering and impasto surfaces transformed anonymously designed, machine-made, mass produced printed matter into unique, autographic, craft objects. The tactic echoed that of Jasper Johns who, in the 1950s, made painted copies of the flat, banal image of the American flag.

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