I Am Not Nike / Coke / Adidas / Heineken etc.

My favourite t-shirt has printed on the chest "This space is not available for corporate advertising"

"The essence of fashion consists in the fact that it should always be exercised by only part of a given group, the great majority of whom are merely on the road to adopting it. As soon as a fashion has become universally adopted, that is, as soon as anything that was originally done only by a few has really come to be practised by all - as is the case in certain elements of clothing and in various forms of social conduct - we no longer characterize it is fashion. Every growth of a fashion drives it to its doom, because it thereby cancels out its distinctiveness." - Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Fashion, The Consumption Reader, (2003) Clarke DB and Doel MA (eds), Routledge.

What We Own Controls Us

Max Weber

"Material goods have gained an increasing an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period of history." - Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 2002 translation by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells, Penguin Books.

"...we are locked into a situation in which we can never stop yearning for new and better things because we are always comparing ourselves with others who have more than we do." - Arthur Asa Berger, (2009), What Objects Mean: An Introduction to Material Culture, Walnut Creek, Left Coast Press.

Conspicuous Consumption

"As fast as a person makes new acquisitions, and becomes accustomed to the new standard of wealth, the new standard forthwith ceases to afford greater satisfaction than the earlier standard did." - Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929)

Advertising and Marxist Economic Theory

"Advertising's immediate goal is to sell artefacts and various kinds of products, but its long range goal is to turn people's attention away from their exploitation and justify the existence of a capitalist economic system." - Arthur Asa Berger, (2009), What Objects Mean: An Introduction to Material Culture, Walnut Creek, Left Coast Press.

Pic - Statue of Karl Marx in Addis Ababa.

Advertising vs. Fine Art

 “Advertising has caused a revolution in the popular art field. Advertising has become respectable in its own right and is beating the fine arts at their old game. We cannot ignore the fact that one of the traditional functions of fine art, the definition of what is fine and desirable for the ruling class and therefore ultimately that which is desired by society, has now been taken over by the ad man.

The fine artist is often unaware that his patron, or more often his patron’s wife who leafs through the magazines, is living in a different world to his own. The pop-art of today, the equivalent of the Dutch fruit and flower arrangements, the pictures of second rank of all Renaissance schools, and the plates that first presented to the public the Wonder of the Machine Age and the New Territories, is to be found in today’s glossies – bound up with the throw-away object” – Alison and Peter Smithson, catalogue of Pop Art, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1991.

Killing Us Softly 3 - Jean Kilbourne

Jean Kilbourne presents the third part of her ongoing lecture series 'Killing Us Softly' about the portrayal of women in advertising and its wider effects on society.