STYLE v DESIGN
What can we learn from the past?
Apparently nothing.
It’s gone so it can’t be any good.
It must be 10, 15, even (gosh) 20 years ago.
How can it be of any use at all?
Our business is obsessed with the new.
It can’t distinguish between change and improvement.
New = Good. Old = Bad.
So everything new is automatically better than everything old?
Well let’s see if that’s true.
Is Damian Hirst automatically better than Picasso?
Is James Blunt automatically better than Elvis?
Is Lewis Hamilton automatically better than Jackie Stewart?
Is Andy Murray automatically better than John MacEnroe?
New is just the ground claimed by people who aren’t good enough to win by being better.
New is just a justification for dull being done in a different way.
So what can anyone learn from the past?
Tracey Emin recently wrote a 4 page article for The Independent about what she’d learned from renaissance painters: Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Raphael, and Titian.
Mike Tyson “The Baddest Man On The Planet”, would constantly play films of the man he learned most from: Jack Dempsey, world champion in the 1920s.
Paul Gascoigne used to study the moves of Johann Cruyff to learn things none of his contemporaries could teach him.
Vivienne Westwood recently said on TV she still learns from studying Coco Channel.
These people don’t just compete with whatever level of talent is around at present.
They compete with, and learn from, the best there’s ever been.
In our business that would be John Webster, Paul Arden, Bill Bernbach, Helmut Krone, etc.
When did you last meet an advertising student who’d even heard of Bill Bernbach?
What makes our business more trivial than any other form of creativity is that we aren’t trying to build on what went before.
We’re just anxious to get to the latest technological gimmick before anyone else.
I think this attitude cheapens what we do.
We confuse being first with creativity.
We confuse ‘new’ with ‘better’.
Isaac Newton said, “If I have done anything it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Oops sorry.
Newton’s dead, he can’t be any good.
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I’ve always thought it shocking how ignorant people in our industry are of their forefathers (and mothers). I suspect that that’s because we’re attracting more and more people who don’t actually care about advertising - just the lifestyle and awards (hello Scamp!) that go with it. That is, idiots.
And it’s also because this industry is now overrun with graphic designers (rather than proper advertising people - copywriters, art directors and other thinkers) who care much more about the likes of Peter Saville and Neville Brody than they do the likes of Ogilvy and Bernbach.
Excellent post :o)
I had an old photography teacher who said that there are no geniuses, just people working hard. Everything has been done already, we are now merely copying.
He used an ad depicting a face made out of vegetables as an example and started referencing this backward to a dutch painter who did the original back in the 17th century. (I think).
Donald Norman writes in one of his books in answer to a question regarding how we create for the new technological age (especially the Internet), and this was his answer:
“Each time a new technology comes along, new designers make the same horrible mistakes as their predecessors. Technologists are not noted for learning the errors of the past. They look forward, not behind, so they repeat the same problems over and over again”
I think ignoring the knowledge of the past is more of a mankind thing than an advertising industry thing.
Brilliant, Dave.
Hope you don’t mind but I’ve posted your piece verbatim on my blog.
Best…Stan
Anytime Stan.
If you see anything you want just take it.
By the way Helge, the artist you are talking of was around at the time of the renaissance, called Archimboldo.
“New media”, case in point?
Hello Paul.
Hi Dave. Spot on.
Funny how people forget that ‘Old’ was once New.
As an aside, it reminds me of the saying ‘there are no new ideas, only old ones that have been forgotten’. Who said that?
Mark, Do you know who said this?
“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect to their elders…. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and are tyrants over their teachers.”
It was Socrates in about 600BC.
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.