Art & Copy Fails Hard

The opening scenes of Art & Copy are as follows:

1. An extended shot of a piece of assumedly prehistoric stone carving, with a classic “entering the TV picture” fourth wall zoom
2. A series of cliché woodland nature shots, with voiceover about the deep artistic feeling of creative people
3. Dan Kennedy (of Wieden+Kennedy) explaining a totem pole

Then they open after the credits with

4. The blue collar billboard “rotator” Chad Tiedeman talking about how his family has been in the bill-posting business for four generations now, since the 1930s.

These four bits don’t make a lot of goddamn sense, and they make even less sense together, but they are quite representative of the documentary as a whole. Did Doug Pray (the director) make this movie to be a simple paint by numbers tribute to the icons of advertising success, or did he really think that watching leaves fall in a pristine forest and surfers bob on deep blue waves reveals deeper meaning to Madison Avenue?

Art & Copy is ostensibly about Advertising, though it puts forth no particular thesis or point of view, beyond perhaps “Advertising people are like, so creative, man!” Unlike Helvetica, which reveals and explores the often subtle and hidden influence of graphic design through the lens of a single iconic font, Art & Copy doesn’t teach you anything you didn’t already know about advertising, assuming that you’ve had even passing familiarity with the concept of selling a “brand.” (And even the philosophy of branding is only mentioned as an afterthought.) I’m not sure what sort of wisdom we’re supposed to take from Dan Kennedy’s little lecture on the significance of parts of a totem pole—is it social hierarchy? Panopticon? Were the Pac-Northwest Native Americans the first advertisers? Does this have something to do with that ambiguous stone-carved stick figure at the beginning? Why am I watching a rocket take off now? Is this something they teach you to do in film school?

The thin strings of sticky white liquid holding this imagery together are interviews with a handful of heavy hitters from advertising’s upper echelons. We get to see the Creatives in their natural habitats: large, open, architecturally interesting firm offices (some of them in warehouses on the west coast, some of them on the 40th floor overlooking Central Park South). We get to enjoy still life shots of their desks and knickknacks and prestige objets d’art. We get to hear those Creatives waxing about the time they made that one ad that everyone remembers to this day. About how they, the rebels, defected from their stultifying corporate art director positions to each found The Most Creative Advertising Firm Ever. You can almost see the director crossing his legs and flapping his hands in front of his face in giddy excitement at getting to interview his childhood heroes.

Like in Helvetica, the characters are colorful, and they sure as hell didn’t get to the top of that game by being boring speakers. The best parts of this documentary are the little gems of wisdom—which swing between hopeful unbound optimism and soul-crushing irony. For example, Nike’s corporate mission of wanting to get people active and empowered and playing sports lines up so harmoniously with positive human development that you want to buy the whole proverbial world a goddamn Coke. Couch potatoes getting exercise! Battered wives leaving their husbands! Then Wieden and Kennedy tell you that their famous “Just Do It” campaign was inspired by a Utah death row inmate, whose last words to the firing squad were “Let’s do it.” There’s no pantone color for humor that black.

Any number of allusions to said black undercurrent could have made for compelling documentary filmmaking, if the director had bothered to explore them at all.

- An early history of marginalization, where the account broker was the top of the totem pole¹ and the creative art and copy producers were at his service: “How big do you want the logo, sir?”

- The maddening dance to please obstinate/risk-averse/old-fashioned/demanding clients while still pushing the boundaries ever-forward

- The inherent predatory and manipulative stance of advertising, getting people to think and buy a particular way.

- The struggle to negotiate between your conscience, your creative impulses, and your ego to come to terms with your place in said capitalist/manipulative industry, surrounded by Don Drapers.

(It’s no wonder that people from Naomi Klein to Banksy have been devoting significant portions of their lives [and creative work, natch] to warning us of the dangers of advertising and brand proliferation².)

Instead, Art & Copy shows advertising as a sunshine and rainbows factory, where everyone is a black sheep and a brilliant creative mind proving all the naysayers wrong, making a billion dollars for every company, and (if you think about it) saving the world at the same time.

At one point, the Creative of the moment leads the camera crew to a truly amazing piece of pop-art another member of his firm has done on the wall—upwards of 100 thousand clear pushpins outlining the word “Fail Harder” in elegant script. Note that he didn’t just fill in the type, the guide says. He did it the hard way, spending 14 days to fill the negative space. Pray misses the entire point of this episode, though, and never once speaks of any kind of failure on the ad-men and women's parts. Only successes which everyone else thought would be giant failures.

By now we’ve spent so much time wanking on the creatives that you’ve forgotten about Tiedeman and his billboard rotators job from the opening paragraph. So has everyone watching the movie. Art & Copy returns (obligatorily) to Tiedeman every 25 minutes. But Tiedeman’s story never develops beyond his immediate task (though, to be fair, nor do the creatives’ stories evolve much beyond “I made these great ads”). While this working class guy sweats on top of a hot billboard unrolling a huge iPod poster, one of the Creatives gets on the voiceover and basically attributes all of free discourse to the capitalist machine. Back in black.

“If we leave a capitalist society and had a communist or socialist system [with] no need for advertising...It would stop people from wanting to tell stories and convince people of something. And if the something isn’t ‘you should buy this’...It might be ‘you should overthrow this government, we should change things.’”³

Well, as the working class guy pointed out, all of his ancestors have always had steady work at the glorious teat of the ad industry, even during the Great Depression. He didn’t need any fool socialist handout programs to help him. But again, what could have been a jumping off point for a heated debate of how advertising affects or is a reflection of the prevailing social structures gets passed by faster than a Burma Shave sign.

Only in the last 5 minutes or so does the documentary make a grudging concession to acknowledge that most advertising is intrusive, base, and cliché. Anyone can do “a thirty second communication to deliver 5 points about a product,” and well, many do. And it’s alienating. As Pray’s own infographic said, 65% of Americans feel they are “constantly bombarded with too much advertising.”

Last, the ad-men and women reflect upon the meaning of the romantic kind of creativity in advertising, the kind where you go beyond the status quo tripe to the art of the message. “Everything should be so ambitious,” they say, lamenting the “MBA types that never take risks.”

Rarely does a film so accurately express critique of itself, but there you have it. This is what the documentary should have been: something that dared to show the ad industry in both its highest creative achievements AND the lowest scum-sucking sinistrality. That dared to ask ambitious questions about creative function in a capitalist society, at the risk of ugly truths. Or at the very least, that wasn’t just a vanity project, a cookie-cutter interview-your-film-school-idols production.




¹Wait, did I just find a connection?

²“Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head” ~Banksy

³Like the “setting-your-article-in Zapf Dingbats” guy from Helvetica, this was the statement that really pissed me off, as a writer. How dare you have the gall to claim that advertising is the only forum for meaningful debate in this country, nay, the driving force behind all independent thought. Irony Ahoy.