Fine Art of Advertising, The

Two great traditions – fine art and American advertising – intersect, interact, and explode off the page as prominent ad man Barry Hoffman examines the twentieth century’s appropriation of art in order to sell, sell, sell. 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 Nan Goldin, are all part of the ad game. In each provocative chapter (“The Ironic Get Going,” “Pop Goes the Easel”, “The Greatest Degeneration”) seasoned with wry observations from art world personalities and commentary by advertising and business-world luminaries, Hoffman shows us the ad world and the art world in a new way, and closes the gap between them–if any remains. So if you like art (even though you don’t follow 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.

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