Welcome to my blog. Yes, blog. Apparently called ‘i have an art blog’; after the Tumblr meme… because I set up my substack account years ago. But, maybe that meme is still appropriate? This is a place where I am going to share some thoughts on the ever thinning line between mass culture (eg. advertising, AI, the internet, Beyoncé) and so-called fine art (eg. Picasso, baby).

What qualifies me as an expert on this? I’ve spent almost two decades in the advertising industry, and many more making and critiquing art. I first fell in love with both art and advertising as a toddler, through an ABC book at local library; which featured reproduced images of artworks in the MoMA collection. My favourite works were all pop art: a movement which stole unabashedly from the visual world of branding.

Florence Cassen Mayers and Florence Cassen Mayers, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, ABC (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1986).

When deciding what career I was going to pursue, it was advertising and not art that was the obvious choice. Art seemed difficult to get into with no contacts, no penis and no money. Whereas, being well paid to have my creative ideas shown to millions seemed much more appealing. My first job was at the infamous advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Set up by brothers Maurice and Charles; the latter used profits from the agency to set up the (arguably more infamous) Saatchi Gallery. The S&S agency Christmas parties were often held in Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, but the agency itself had its own impressive collection. The first Andy Warhol I ever saw in person was on a wall in a meeting room at the agency. The company also had an extensive collection of works by Dick Frizzell; a contemporary painter who had once worked there as a designer. We’ll get into all that in another post.

The point I want to make is that in my lifetime fine art and advertising having always borrowed from each other. While the advertising industry may be proud of this fact, many art historians still reinforce a distinction between ‘high culture’ and and the rest of the visual world we consume. I am also guilty of believing this border is real. I recently completed a masters degree in History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London. Having passed with a distinction, I like to think that I am now qualified to talk about art history too.

Through this blog, I want to investigate who benefits from a distinction between high and low culture, how this distinction is reinforced, and critique the places where it disappears.

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