With the latest Turner Prize triumph still fresh in our minds, here’s the Fallon agency’s new ad for Sony’s Bravia TVs. Like its predecessors, this one hints at why the notion of art as something aloof from, and critical of, commercial culture now seems mannered, rather creaky and, perhaps, obsolete.
More, including the making of.
Update:
As requested, here’s the making of the ‘Play Doh’ ad.
And, to complete the set, here’s the making of ‘balls’ and ‘paint’.
I always felt the “shock” tactics of the Britart movement of the 1990s were directly modeled on the success of the Bennetton “shock” advertizing campaign which preceded it. The fact that Britart was largely bankrolled by a Tory advertizing millionaire may be significant. He probably saw his own skill-set being reflected back at him…
Georges,
I think it’s much deeper than that. I quite like being shocked by skill and beauty. But a fixation with theory and political posturing has, in many cases, overshadowed the notion that art can make a person feel something affirming, and even, on a good day, something close to awe. It seems to me that at the very least art should make the viewer wish they too could make something that has a similar, pleasing, effect. But perhaps that’s much too bourgeois and prosaic.
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/02/art_bollocks_re.html
I can’t recall the last time I went to a gallery and saw something new that had a significant positive effect on me. In fact, disappointment has become my default expectation and I’m less and less inclined to go to galleries. Yet TV commercials – supposedly the lowest of the low, the very nipple of Satan – can, and do, perform the function art was once assumed to serve. As I suggested in the Guardian piece linked above, I suspect that many conceptual artists secretly wish they were good enough to work in advertising, while publicly disdaining lowly commerce on ideological grounds.
Whenever I see large Bunny wabbits, I reach for my copy of Donny Darko.
It’s a bunnywhale, surely?
I must obviously pay more attention to adverts! (I usually just mute them)
P.S. IMHO Samsung are better than Sony.
AC1,
“I must obviously pay more attention to adverts!”
I’m sure the advertisers would agree. And once in a while something comes along that’s rather special. I still have fond memories of an advert in which bras were being tested in a wind tunnel.
Colorful bunnies are clever and nice and all, but I don’t think they have the enduring quality of, say, Jeff Koons sodomizing his wife on film.
sorry Squid, don’t agree. Bunnies forever!