Csaplár Ferenc szerk.: Lajos Kassák / The Advertisement and Modern Typography (1999)

The Advertisement

THE ADVERTISEMENT Snobbish aesthetes loathe advertisements, and so do sociologists moving around in the fields of science and business. The aesthete degrades them as profane formality, the sociologist sees in them the destruction and compromise of commerce and, in general, of democratic forms of life. It is easy to disprove these two positions, which are arrived at from different directions, but are essentially the same. I. The beautiful in itself is an empty fiction, because the beautiful is not a primary phenomenon, it is only a secondary one. It is only present as a consequence, as an attribute, of something. If a fact or an object is perfect in itself, if it serves its purpose, it will undeniably be beautiful too. Thus the beautiful, as a human attribute, is inevitably concomitant with all organic and organised entities. The advertisement, as a human product, also contains the criteria of the beautiful or the ugly. Its aesthetic anathematisation is thus not a critical position but irresponsible and importunate snobbery. II. A good advertisement is beautiful from an aesthetic point-of-view, and is necessary from a social point-of-view. The advertisement was called to life by commerce, and commerce is an outcome of humankind's ever more discriminating demands on life. Naturally, should one express his opinion on the average European advertisement, he can easily state that this and this advertisement is tasteless and antisocial. But this is just as much true of today's free market capitalism. Nonetheless, this should in no way imply the denial of commerce once and for all, but it should imply basing commerce on more socially responsible foundations. True enough, Russia today puts out far more extensive cultural and economic propaganda than she did under the tsars. Russia did not abolish the advertisement, she only liberated it from the claws of selfish private interest, reshaping this formerly antisocial force into propaganda working on behalf of the community. Thus it was reborn not only in a moral sense, but in artistic significance as well. The Russian advertisement, often like the American one, has distanced itself from individual graphic art, after discovering its own particular character, it has become simple, economical and demonstrative. In this sense, a good advertisement is an active social factor in our lives, and we appraise it with the adjective effective, not with the adjective beautiful. Though the materials through which its essence is expressed are colour, sound and form, just as in the case of the subjective arts, on the whole it even severs itself from industrial art. It is not a lyrical composition, nor is it a decorative surface. This is why, for instance, a well-made poster may provide, among other things, aesthetic pleasure to the viewer, while an artistically successful painting can never immediately strike us to bethink ourselves, it can never evoke from us the hunger for the new, the sensational. The public in an art gallery enjoys the passive aestheticism of subjective art, but if we look at a bill-board, it is the competition of posters that dominates in our eyes, not their juxtaposition. The good advertisement, be it optical (poster, fly-bill, brochure, or luminous writing projected into the night) or acoustic (the scream of a siren, the shrill of a bell), steps on to the stage with the raiding tempo of a conqueror, with the legion of marketed goods lining up behind. It is a power complex standing between production and consumption, not a servile mediator of something exterior to itself. Sociology and psychology are fundamental to the good advertisement. Nuances of mood or illustrative loquacity are contrary to the essence of advertising, they impede immediate effect and convincing suggestion. The good advertisement is not analytical and definitive, it is synthesising: it unifies time, content and material. It is this elemental simplicity and purity of a good advertisement that stops us for a moment now and then in a clamorous and motley street, that takes us into a store never heard of before, that makes us open an unknown book by an unknown author, that wakes us from mundane listlessness, lowly blindness and deafness, with its elemental colours and dynamic formal articulation, it makes us inquisitive and determined. The advertisement is one of the most characteristic expressions of the level and economic circulation of our age. The neon signs of a metropolis, the sky-line advertisements, the shop windows, the conspicuous characters and harsh exclamation marks on a glass pillar in a boulevard have more to say, and do so more objectively, than any garrulous and reactionarily blunt-witted Baedeker; a typographically well-made brochure of a department-store, with its clear-cut and easily identifiable types, with the dark and light spatial divisions of its paper surface, as a calm and simple object, is far more demand arousing and dependable than any individual artistry; the unexpected shriek of a horn will for ever fix in our memories the automobile yard or the cinema, in front of which we heard this "senseless" but strikingly simple and suggestive sound. The type of advertisement characteristic of our times, the attributes of which are more and more the harmony of elements, marked simplicity and technically easy producibility, comes into being not with aesthetic aims but in the name of objective power and moves in the direction of human progress. Creating an advertisement is an applied art, an advertisement artist is a social creator. PÁSMO, VOL. II, NO. 6-7 (1926); KORUNK (OUR TIMES), 1926, 4, pp. 299-300; TISZTASÁG KÖNYVE (THE BOOK OF PURITY), BUDAPEST, 1926, PP. 82-84; KUNST UND VOLK, 1930, 8 (SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE ART OF THE BOOK), PP. 237-238; DAS WERK, 1926, 7, pp. 228.