Big Little ThingsJonathan Lethem on art and advertising
This month’s issue (Feb 07) of Harper’s Magazine is fucking dope. It’s got a bunch of provocative stuff related to intellectual property rights and copyfight, and the best piece is Jonathan Lethem’s essay The Ecstasy of Influence.
The whole essay is worth reading, but there’s one riff I wanna make sure you don’t miss:
Art that matters to us—which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—is received as a gift is received. Even if we’ve paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us that has nothing to do with the price. The daily commerce of our lives proceeds at its own constant level, but a gift conveys an uncommodifiable surplus of inspiration.
The way we treat a thing can change its nature, though. Religions often prohibit the sale of sacred objects, the implication being that their sanctity is lost if they are bought and sold. We consider it unacceptable to sell sex, babies, body organs, legal rights, and votes. The idea that something should never be commodified is generally known as inalienability or unalienability—a concept most famously expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the phrase “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . .†A work of art seems to be a hardier breed; it can be sold in the market and still emerge a work of art. But if it is true that in the essential commerce of art a gift is carried by the work from the artist to his audience, if I am right to say that where there is no gift there is no art, then it may be possible to destroy a work of art by converting it into a pure commodity. I don’t maintain that art can’t be bought and sold, but that the gift portion of the work places a constraint upon our merchandising. This is the reason why even a really beautiful, ingenious, powerful ad (of which there are a lot) can never be any kind of real art: an ad has no status as gift; i.e., it’s never really for the person it’s directed at.
I think he’s done an awesome job of explaining why people respond to advertising differently than they do to art. No matter how effective the spin, marketing that doesn’t care about its audience will never be received as a gift. I know I don’t view ads as gifts, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. So why is advertising so common?
