Art Can Heal
Photography by Ben Watts. T-Shirts by Scott Campbell:
Art is often inherently about seeing beauty from others’ perspectives. When we look at someone else’s art, we have the opportunity to attempt to see beauty from another person’s perspective. We don’t have to see things only in the ways we have seen them before. And those are reasons why art can heal.
Thanks for posting these ads. They are nice extensions of Jenny Holzer’s conceptualist art in a commerncial application. Each image can be analyzed: the use of black/white tops and bottoms, black word on white ground, black and white people for models has connotations of meaning in common with the idea of “plain truth”. The soft sell paragraphs giving details of each girl’s social justice-related involvement is a welcome departure from the type of breathless and mindless copy that was so common in use by advertisers in the not too distant past. However the bottom line is still this - Sex Sells - in this case, not only simple products, but also ideas such as the fact that arts are a balm, that we need to be reminded to provide comfort for others, that there needs be more low tech activity such as walking, and that it may be desirable to present the self, simply. A new standard of beauty is proffered up here, to be emulated by the many young people who view these ads - unadorned naturalness is attractive. Advertisers co-opt and use art innovations and knowledge gained from intensive research in the social sciences and in marketing to arrive at this clever series of adverts which will appeal to and don’t turn off the buying public. This means that current preoccupations by members of our consumer society, such as the ever burning question of “What can I do, how can I act as an individual to counter (insert: Global Warming, Carbon Emissions, Conserve Resources, etc etc)” are exploited as an aid to stimulating the economy in a sensitive and socially responsible manner.
Appeals to our desire to be and act better to sell, ideas and products, in these examples show a similarity to propagandistic advertisements during wartime to exhort the masses through, print, film, radio media to believe, react and act in appropriate and desirable ways.