Surrounded

Even as I recently walked the halls of a shoe show at the Las Vegas Convention, I became more and more interested. In the midst of all of the noise of Las Vegas, both visual and audible, there was something different that surrounded me. The people looked the same, the food tasted the same, and the lights were still bright, yet an emphasis in advertising, even within the shoe show, was different than it was ten years ago. I walked by booth after booth that was filled with both promises of “green” products and promises of pro-social giving on profits. Shoes were being made out of organic products and soles were now composed of recycled tires. This is where the difference manifested itself.

In the advertising.

In a business that has historically advertised long legs that happened to be wearing shoes, advertising was now focused on positive stewardship of the earth. The message is no different elsewhere in America. All one has to do is turn on the television or open a magazine and the message is clear.

American advertisers are exploiting positive causes to maximize profits.

The following reflections through this website will explore the implications of this phenomenon within the post-modern and post-Christian culture in which we dwell.

Ads are the state of art. (A) The average American consumes approximately three thousand advertisements per day, (B) many of which we are unaware that we are absorbing. Four hundred billion dollars (C) is spent annually to develop the best ways to proclaim that certain products are exactly what we “need” to have. Naturally, in order to powerfully project messages, visuals and creativity are needed, drawing what some call our cultures finest art into the business of advertising. It is a mysterious marriage between the need for advertising to influence and the desire of artists to be influential. (D) Artists understand that there is no medium of popular culture that is more influential. Subsequently, photographers, visual artists, and the like, tend to participate with advertising agencies by providing advertisers with the images that they need to influence. Thus, some of the finest artists in America today work in advertising and therefore continue to blur the lines of high art and pop art. This is just one of many visible signs that we are indeed living within a post-modern culture. William Dyrness in Visual Faith writes,

“The world of high art is in the process of being co-opted by popular culture.” (E)

Dyrness fully recognizes in his book that the lines of high art and pop art are being continuously blurred. A perfect example of art and creativity converging together to form a post-modern advertisement is seen in Apple’s recent series comparing itself to PC. This simple advertisement is changing people on many levels and continues to be significant in the Apple Empire. (For instance The Youtube posted below has been viewed 450,000 times. This means that over 450,000 people have intentionally sought to fill their mind with this advertisement/art from Apple.)