“I don’t consider advertising art,” says Mary Warlick, an art historian and executive director of The One Club, the New York trade organization that recognizes creative excellence in advertising. Art is visual imagery that is meant to elevate thinking in an aesthetic context. What advertising does is give a visual record of our cultural ambiance and history, our tastes, our trends, our wants, our needs, our buying. It is never meant to elevate us to that higher plane.”

Well Mary, we may not be historians here in the Foxden, but we’ll bet dollars for doughnuts on the fact that advertising can be art. Here are 3 Reasons Why!

Creatives

Designers, filmmakers, photographers, writers and the like, are behind the incredibly creative ads we see each and every day. Like us, these artists have decided to make a living off their creativity by striking up a social contract with the commercial world, something we must all do in one way or another. Yes the bottom line is to help business’s grow and profit, but this doesn’t make their creative outputs less artistic.

The Mandate

Visually speaking, a billboard and a painting share the same mandate; that is to evoke an emotion or an idea and effect the viewer. Both are coercive in a sense. What one does with the emotion, idea or opinion generated by looking is irrelevant. The intention does not determine the form.

William Bernbach, a giant of American advertising in the 1960s and 1970s says,

“Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.”

Culturally Relevant

Ads intentionally and un-intentionally hold a mirror to us and our place in time. Same as art, the ad has socio-historical relevance and can speak volumes long past its creation.

So…

Given the time of year and our desire to show Mary Warlick a thing or two, we fall dubiously into the trend of creating a top ten list, in this case a Partner Top 30. These are Dan Rascals most Beloved Ads of 2014; ads that slapped us with nostalgia, made us giddy with anticipation and drew us around each others computers to laugh, cringe and cry.

Some may even be considered art.

We’ll leave it up to you though.