An illustration from a 1921 advertisement for Djer-Kiss face powders, talcs, soaps, etc.

Before you came to this blissful refuge, where advertisements stay in one place and are not allowed to dance around your screen and cover up what you intended to read, you were probably subjected to a visual cacophony of moving pictures. That sort of animated clutter is not allowed here. Out of our unbounded faith in the virtues of capitalism, we do allow certain commercial enterprises occasional space in our Magazine; but they must abide by certain strict rules. In particular, Dr. Boli never allows a display advertisement to use type he has not designed himself. There are standards to be upheld.

You will find but few other places in the World Wide Web where such standards prevail. If there is advertising at all, it is usually either unpardonably annoying or ignorably bland.

Imagine yourself living in a world, then, where this could be written and taken seriously:

At present, the bulk of professional drawing in this country goes to advertise our wares—a state of things which cynics enjoy. The offset is that while we are undoubtedly cheapening art by putting it to “base uses,” we are at the same time giving an almost compensating charm to our commercialism, and are making sure that artists can live—at least on a par with other professions. An exhibit of advertising “originals,” without their propaganda for this or that talcum or talking machine, is a really excellent art collection. The worker has his own standards of excellence, not altogether for sale; and meantime, the good by-product of better advertising is a training of the public taste in art. (“Drawing” in Book I, Education, of The Volume Library, 1931.)

Yes, it was possible to say that in 1931 and neither laugh nor be laughed at.

Now think of our advertising here in the middle 2020s, and ask this one probing question: Does it work?

Undoubtedly some of it does. But to limit ourselves to the Internet for the moment, what is the most usual reaction to an advertisement? When a panel advertising Malt-O-Cod suddenly pops up over the thing you were reading, do you give it your undivided attention? Do you think, “Ho, good, here comes something beautiful and well-executed by an artist whose work will improve my taste if I devote some serious study to it”? No; you do what it takes to make it disappear, often without even knowing what it was advertising.

But suppose it began to be well known that most, or at least many, of these advertisements were works of art by artists who deserved our praise and attention. What would be the result? We would look forward to the advertisements. We would see them coming and rejoice. We would give them our attention and even notice what they advertised. We would buy Malt-O-Cod.

This seems to have been the theory of the advertisers of the first half of the twentieth century. To a large extent, furthermore, it seems to have been correct. People did remember those advertisements and the products they advertised.

So what can we do? Nothing individually, but together we can do everything. Pledge yourself now to make your buying decisions on the basis of one question: which of the companies I am considering supports beauty?

Marketers themselves may be immune to beauty. They may consider the artistic sense an unfortunate curse and take drugs to suppress it. But they are mesmerised by numbers. If we show them that beauty sells, then they will give us beauty, because beauty will cause large numbers to dance in their spreadsheets and activate the reward centers of their brains. It is easy to make the pledge, because it seldom deprives us of anything worthwhile: when we are choosing between two detergents or toothpastes, it is usually true that they both work perfectly well. We can make our choice as whimsically as we like. Start making your choices on the basis of beauty, and see how quickly the marketers start shoveling great steaming heaps of beauty in our direction.