I can absolutely see what they're going for- something like "you're iPad contains the power of all these cultural tools", but visually that connection isn't there. It just looks like "Hooray! Culture has been destroyed, now there is only iPad!"
I do think that the 'rendered' idea was the best - almost thinking differently, or something...:S
It's like getting mad at road runner for dropping a piano on Wile E Coyote.
Like the paint cans exploding over the piano:
As the other comment says, the cans would never crush flat before the piano starts to deform at all. Then when the front of the piano comes open, a pile of all the dampers just falls out, despite that area not being touched yet. It's all done to look exciting but not realistic.
The CG isn't even that good. It looks like something out of DALL-E.
It calls to mind yet another way in which the ad could have been crafted to communicate without controversy or offense -- the instruments could have been more obviously cartoons.
Why wouldn't them? It might be cheaper and more realistic for this scene.
The giant press might be CGI. But some closeups look real. Like the paint cans exploding over the piano:
https://youtu.be/ntjkwIXWtrc?si=N6QWwagucRyKp40P&t=20
If you got a source please share.
All that is there is a megacorp stealing a previously popular (comical) format, to show people's culture being (quite forcefully) transformed into establishment. The commercial is repulsively anti-punk.
Sorry, but this polished piece of corporate messaging is anything but art. It's at best shiny kitsch.
2. It looks like you're implying the ad is somehow a piece of art. It's not, it's an ad.
I'd say flyers for shows are art. or movie posters. or book covers, for that matter. Or trailer music? corporate jingles? They're all art.
Art is roughly self-expression or interpretation of reality performed with symbolic means.
It's a debatable definition of course, as aesthetics are nebulous, but most others are far too broad and therefore lose their meaning and usability, at least in the academic context.
> I'd say flyers for shows are art. or movie posters. or book covers, for that matter. Or trailer music? corporate jingles? They're all art.
They are not if we're talking in generals, though there can be conditions where a specific piece can be viewed as such, of course. All the things you mentioned are products of craft most of the time. Crafts belong to the wider sphere of aesthetic culture of course, but it's not art. Of course, I know some artist/illustrators closely collaborating with authors/musicians for their posters and covers, but it's more of an exception to the rule.
Roughly speaking, the need to tailor a creation to align with the desired brand image or marketing strategy inevitably conflicts with honest self-expression.
I'm long out of the loop, so I can give only general directions. You could say that the definition in question aligns with Riegl's idea of embodiment of Kunstwollen, perhaps in some way with Collingwood's aesthetic expressivism view of art, and also integrates the semiotics approach, which helps with underlining the importance of both the form/medium and the subjectivity of perception (this is important for looking at art in historical/sociological context).
If your question was, in fact, an Ad Locus attack - well, the name for it is Genetic Fallacy, I believe.
PS: A school of thought is located in the minds of its supporters ;)
A school of thought is located in the minds of its supporters
Don't these two statements together mean that you just made up the definition in your own mind?
My postscript just meant to point out the fact that since you asked a question about a school as a place while answering to my comment mentioning a school of thought (that's not a place), perhaps there's some miscommunication happening.
Me mentioning a school of thought and not a specific institution implied the fact that when it comes to culture, there could be a considerable variety of positions within one such institution. For example: when it comes to universities, students can be taught by professors from different faculties but the subjects can intersect significantly, so they get to see the varying approaches to even the basic stuff and they are supposed to make their own minds. Humanities are like that, there's no formulas set in stone until disproven.
Can you give me one example of this school of thought? An actual institution or some book/paper that goes into this topic? I have not been able to find much anything except broader topics of culturology or science of culture. I've also not found anything suggesting that my examples aren't considered art by it.
> All the things you mentioned are products of craft most of the time. Crafts belong to the wider sphere of aesthetic culture of course, but it's not art.
Crafts and Art overlap frequently. Someone can be a woodworker that builds tables and they might not be an artist. They fine tune their craft and build sturdy, excellent tables, but they're not creating art. However, if they are making creative decisions about how they want to express themselves through the tables they create, yes, it is art.
> Of course, I know some artist/illustrators closely collaborating with authors/musicians for their posters and covers, but it's more of an exception to the rule.
It hardly matters if they are or aren't, you don't need a band to participate in the creation of a flyer for it to be considered art. The art part comes in from what the artist who is creating it.
> Roughly speaking, the need to tailor a creation to align with the desired brand image or marketing strategy inevitably conflicts with honest self-expression.
Constraints are a normal part of the process of creating art. If I commission someone to create an oil painting on a canvas of a specific size, that is also requiring an artist to tailor their creation to align with an external factor out of their control. That doesn't make the resulting piece not art.
I get that physical constraints aren't the same as ones that are tied into art, like what message you're communicating. I think I just fundamentally disagree that it disqualifies something from being art. If I give a writing prompt to a writer, is the resulting piece of literature disqualified from being art because I shaped what it is to be about? I don't think so. Similarly, I don't think that defining themes to use in the creation of a piece of art makes it less honest. It just means that the self-expression is conveyed through different means.
I believe this comes from the Church having been a major sponsor of art in the West for centuries.
> you would have very little left that we currently recognize as art.
What's the problem with that?
There are a long list of arts with adjectives in front of them. commercial art, applied art, fine art, etc...they aren't art just because you have co-opted art to mean only fine art. Also see:
https://miguelcamarena.com/blogs/news/fine-art-vs-commercial...
Tear gas is designed to make you feel something.
https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/prints/person/42321/le-chat-...
Art
Is
Nothing
Is
Art
"Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." - Cesar A. Cruz
Its not Apple's style, but they could have opened the ad with some cringe fake scientists discussing how to shrink and/or combine and/or smush music, books, art, etc together. And then at the end show them excitedly rushing to the IPad as if they've solved everything.
It might seem that way to people of a certain age, but the "humorously inadvisable science experiment" trope is wayyy older.
This ad makes perfect sense from that perspective.
edit: I'm surprised at the downvote. I'm a huge Zappa fan. I know that he was into many kinds of music. That is why I find it strange that he doesn't even consider the rich tradition of American folk music to be part of our culture.
So which is it, am I wrong that he was a great musician? Am I wrong about the rich tradition of American folk music? Am I wrong about pop culture in other countries? Is it because I didn't mention country music?
I understand and agree with your point that certain genres of music have significantly evolved, if not been entirely created in, the US, and that it's weird for a professional musician to take the stance that that isn't the case.
At the same time, I've often thought similar things to what Frank Zappa said (despite never hearing/reading that interview before, or knowing much about him at all). I often think about how a lot of the social/racial/religious/etc unrest we have going on in the US is because we have no national identity. We are a melting pot, but we're also just a melting pot.
Similar to convincing people to stop perpetuating racial issues in the US, when race used to be connected with nationality (and still is in some places)-- or convincing people to stop raking modern-day Americans over the coals for people 250 years ago taking the land from Native Americans-- it's going to be difficult to convince people to draw a line at a point in time where we stopped "stealing" or "being influenced by" other countries' music and started legitimately creating our own. It will simply never have been "from scratch," and people will either figure out how to accept that and (critically) move on at some point, or they'll keep being upset about it for eternity and we'll keep tearing ourselves apart.
The point he's making was (c. 1970) that much of American culture's presumption of innate superiority post-WW2 was unfounded overconfidence demonstrating a lack of humility and intrinsic tempered confidence in relation to other rich traditions that also exist. It is also true that American culture was and is intrinsically hollow and shallow in many (but not all) dimensions not replicated in other parts of the world. And to be fair, Zappa was brilliant and a guitar virtuoso but a bit off in a way the 60's-70's counterculture celebrated profusely in a reactionary oppositional mirror of mainstream American culture. Growing up, my hippie nudist neighbors with their hydroponic weed and horrible tasting tomatoes would be all over everything Zappa. Incidentally, I have a signed Zappa KSJO sticker signed at a Campbell, CA venue and its newspaper clipping provenance... going to get it framed and probably sell it on FleaBay at some point.