The Fine Art Of Advertising

Two great traditions--fine art and American advertising--intersect, interact, and explode off the page as ad man Hoffman examines the 20th century's appropriation of highbrow art to sell the products consumers love. 150 photos.

Two great traditions--fine art and American advertising--intersect, interact, and explode off the page as ad man Barry Hoffman examines the twentieth century's appropriation of highbrow art to sell us the products we love. Filled with vibrant ads that playfully use art-history icons--such as da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's David, Botticelli's Venus, and Warhol's soup cans--as well as rarely seen commissioned art from masters such as Willem de Kooning, Jacob Lawrence, and Rene Magritte, Hoffman shows how the boundaries between fine art and advertising have disappeared. In fact, today's cutting-edge artists, such as Damien Hirst, Barbara Kruger, and Jeff Koons, are all part of the ad game. Seasoning each provocative chapter ("The High Art of Class Lust, " "Pop Goes the Easel, " "The Greatest Degeneration") with wry observations from art world personalities and advertising luminaries, Hoffman shows us how narrow the gap between art and advertising really is. So if you like art (even though you don't follo it closely), and advertising (even while you hate the fact that you can't escape it), the irreverent, irrepressible, irresistibly ironic Barry Hoffman gives you Both for the Price of One. "We live in a culture where advertisers don't think twice about using the world's most famous paintings to sell their products, and where painters become famous by making art out of advertising."