Adcult USA

The best thing about Adcult USA (Columbia University Press, 279 pp), a cheeky bit of window dressing that might have been subtitled How to Succeed in Academia Without Really Trying, is that the author does not take himself too seriously. "When university professors write about a subject, one thing is certain," sighs James B. Twitchell, Alumni Professor at the University of Florida, "the wave has passed."

Twitchell loves advertising, and why not? The stuff is the ether of America, the chewy caramel nougat of our culture, our aqua vitae. When poet-warrior Norman Mailer titles a collection of his literary musings Advertisements for Myself, when king-of-all-media Howard Stern grows rich and famous talking four hours a day about his career, when President Clinton keeps a steady supply of spin doctors on hand at 1600 Madison, er, Pennsylvania Avenue, then even the most obtuse citizen of the republic must agree with Twitchell's thesis: Ads R Us.

Refreshingly, Twitchell sees a silver lining in the cumulonimbus of Adcult. American society isn't in danger of disintegration or about to sink into the slough of despond. Allan Bloom and E.D. Hirsh got it wrong. Students may not know who wrote "Dover Beach" or where and when the Battle of the Bulge was fought, but they share a powerful heritage that gives their lives meaning. "Blacks and whites, males and females, front row and back row do have a common culture," asserts Twitchell, even if that culture consists of icons such as Nike, bromides such as "Two scoops!" and heroes and heroines such as Joe Camel and Betty Crocker. "There is a cohesive power in the remembrance of things past. It does link us together. Let Proust have his madeleines. We have ads."

Adcult USA is a fun read, a bit of a send-up, really. Twitchell doesn't pretend to offer great insights--he periodically disclaims any pretense that his ideas are new, and his favorite prediction for the future is "Who knows!" -- but he writes well and takes enormous delight in debunking Marxists, feminists and earnest moralists of all stripes, including the guardians of high culture.

How do we know fashion-photographer Richard Avedon is a genuine avatar of 20th-century aesthetics, his celebrity portraits more than an endorsement of smug status seekers? "Because Avedon has also photographed coal miners, asylum inmates, cross-dressers, and drifters," writes Twitchell. "More important, the New Yorker, the vade mecum of middle-brow Adcult, gives Avedon almost weekly space, announcing him in the table of contents simply as Avedon (as if he were Madonna or Cher, for goodness' sake)." No to mention that New York's Whitney Museum of American Art graced him with a retrospective covering a half-century of his work. "Best part of the show? Page 157 of the exhibition catalog. Avedon directing a catalog shoot for Bloomingdale's from his sickbed cot in a studio, like some Roman soldier unwilling to leave the battlefield."

Twitchell's central conceit is tried and true. Advertising has replaced religion as the organizing principle of society. "In a most profound sense advertising and religion are part of the same meaning-making process," he writes. "They occur at the margin of human concern about the world around, and each attempts to breach the gap between us and objects by providing a systematic understanding." More specifically, what religion was to Renaissance Italy, advertising is to corporate America. Florence in the late 16th century has been resurrected as Manhattan in the late 20th.

"Renaissance stuff," as Twitchell calls the religious paintings and icons that filled Florentine churches, "was everywhere." Demand outstripped supply as mendicant orders competed for supplicants. "I need a fresco like Giotto's," the author imagines one Benedictine superior telling his resident artisan. "I need another Donatello but bigger." Leonardo and Michelangelo? Commercial artists churning out commissions for the Medici family, who had its own chapel inside the Duomo much as IBM had its own art gallery in its building in New York. "Florentine churches celebrated more than a hundred masses a day," notes Twitchell. "They needed more space. They devoured new media."

Twitchell blithely explains the transubstantiation that turned florens into dollars over the next 400 years -- we've read it before anyway -- but he puts his own spin on the commingling of "religion and politics and refrigerators." We aren't victims of greedy manipulative Madison Avenue Svengalis who are turning us into consuming automatons for the sake of a sale. Rather, advertisers serve a useful social function, imbuing our world with meaning and order and offering the possibility of peace and salvation. "The stigmata will be removed," writes Twitchell. "Ring around the collar will disappear. Sin, guilt, redemption: problem, anxiety, resolution."