The persuasive power of an exquisite image. The irresistible lure of an enigmatic text. Delightful designs that draw you into a world, disclose possiblities you hadn't imagined, open you up to objects, ideas, and events in which you'll want to invest.... [more]

The persuasive power of an exquisite image. The irresistible lure of an enigmatic text. Delightful designs that draw you into a world, disclose possiblities you hadn't imagined, open you up to objects, ideas, and events in which you'll want to invest. This is what good advertising does. It moves you in a certain way, brings you into a space of novel offerings where efficient systems, enticing embellishments, and bold innovations beckon. It is the art of reading, reckoning with, and revising the interests and desires of a particular public. Like the rhetoric of antiquity, it is the art of divining souls, seizing the attention of crowds, delivering the word that will entice, enrapture and, yes, sell. This, of course, requires a discerning eye, a subtle ear, a sensitive sense for the appropriate moment. Windows open up in the world. The advertisor has to pay heed to these openings, find the time and the place to slip the images in. The images, the text and the overall design have to fit the specific shape of this or that opening, this or that window. Advertising is the art of insinuating something seductive in the crack of the open window. But it is also, of course, the art of manipulation. The advertisor does not only respond to contemporary trends; he or she creates them. At the edges are hidden spaces that advertising itself has to open. The insidious power of this art is its capacity not only to read and to reckon with the public's desires, but to induce new ones, to determine the direction of needs, the vectors of the will, the path along which wanting walks. This is the art of introducing the subtly unfamiliar product, the product that does not yet have its place in the world, the product that has the capacity to make its own place. And at its best advertising lingers on the delicate line between these two approaches, between reading the wants of today and creating the wants of tomorrow. At its best advertising insinuates within the ground of the familiar an evanescently offset element, forging something new at the edge of the now. [show less]