Down the Warhol
The Godfather of content creation
What do Andy Warhol, Salman Rushdie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ridley Scott and Jim Henson have in common? They all started off in adverting. Ok, Scott and Henson had worked in TV before they started their advertising careers but it was advertising that gave them their first real successes.
It’s not surprising that this is the case. If you remember that the goal of advertising is to steal the attention of the audience away from a range of other distractions it seems like a perfect training ground for the aspiring artist. A friend of my parents who didn’t own a TV was baffled by the fact that when he visited his wife’s parents, they would put their TV on mute during the ad breaks. “But those are the best bits” he’d protest.
Also, it isn’t accidental that so many creative individuals start out in advertising. For a start, it’s a chance to earn some much needed money. Further than that, it was built into the training process. For instance, Ridley Scott attended an Art School in the UK, and Keith Richards who attended Sidcup Art College had the following to say about the UK’s Art Schools
“There was almost no ‘art’ to be had at Sidcup. After a while you got a drift of what you were being trained for and it wasn’t Leonardo da Vinci. Loads of flash little sons of bitches would come down in their bow ties from J. Walter Thompson or one of the other big advertisers for one day a week to take the piss out of the art school students and try and pick up the chicks. They’d lord it over us and you got taught how to advertise…I realise now we were getting some dilapidated tail end of a noble art-teaching tradition from the pre-war period… all thrown away on advertising Gilbey’s Gin.”
However, this attitude also reveals where Warhol differs. Richards’ comments reveal a clear hierarchy between art and advertising. Advertising was OnlyFans for the frustrated artist. A shameful necessity to be glossed over when something more worthy came along. There was no mistaking one for the other. What Warhol seems to have realised was there was no need for this dichotomy. Bright colours and a bit of totty could ensnare the sophiscates as well as well as it could the hoi polloi. Advertising could be art and art could be advertising. And, of course, there was one product in particular Warhol was interested in advertising: himself.
Now, I must admit that I used to see Warhol as a bit of a shyster. I’ve always struggled to see the value in all those soup cans and multicoloured celebs. But then, I was judging him by trying to gauge his artistic merit. How gauche! What I can now see is that none of the paintings, or the films, or the music mattered. They were all just selling the Warhol brand. The level of prescience Warhol displayed with this is borderline genius.
Of course, this idea is now commonplace. Most of the ‘content’ put out by influencers and YouTubers is very thinly veiled advertising for some snail oil or other. It seems quaint now to think of Bill Hicks’ anti advertising rants from the early 90’s. These days comedians have taken to recording crowd work so that they can produce content (i.e. advertising) on platforms such as TikTok without having to use actual material.
Where it gets weirder is that this is no longer limited to ‘content creators’. The other day an electrician we had in to do a few bits for us was asking if he could take some photos to put on his Instagram account. The weirder part is I know why. I can often see my wife scrolling through pictures of others peoples homes on Instagram. My electrician knows his audience.
However, even with all of this. The thing that really brought this new reality home for me was a course I went on recently. My boss is forever trying to get me to be better at self promotion and sent me on a course that may as well have been titled ‘How to be a Better Corporate Grifter’. The guy running the course kept extolling the virtues of writing tech articles on LinkedIn. I think it’s how he got his current CTO role. So now, even tech articles are just new fangled ‘Gilbeys Gin’ ads.
I’ll make one final observation here. One upshot of the old American network TV model where TV productions were funded by advertising revenue was that the creative output was notoriously safe. Nothing could be done that might scare the sponsors. No sex, no swearing and no taboo subject matter. When the subscription funded HBO model took off in the early ‘90s there was an explosion of ground breaking new TV shows like ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘The Wire’. Once the constraints that were imposed by the ad men were removed, TV could be more complex, more challenging and, let’s face it, better.
Now play that in reverse. What happens when most of the content being consumed is not only funded by advertising, it actually is advertising? It might not matter much if it’s teenage girls putting on make up, but would you want your bank’s infrastructure to be designed by folks who got their ideas from some grifter on LinkedIn?
Either way, we’re all down the Warhol now.
