The Greatest Art Form of the Twentieth Century

William Uricchio, “The Greatest Art Form of the Twentieth Century” Journal of Visual Studies 13:1
(2014): 104-106

1.

To the extent that the ratio of time to money is a value indicator in a capitalist culture,

Marshall McLuhan was spot on in his 1953 Commonweal claim that ‘Ads represent the

main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world’. A decade later in

Understanding Media, he developed the idea, saying ‘Historians and archaeologists will

one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that

any society ever made of its entire range of activities’. And by 1976, appropriately

enough on the pages of Advertising Age, insight morphed into aphorism: ‘Advertising is

the greatest art form of the twentieth century’. This trio of quotes plucked from the

ample comments McLuhan made on the topic can be put to many uses. They encapsulate

the broad contours of his career-long rhetorical trajectory, suggest his shift in interest

from human agency to what Raymond Williams described as ‘instrumental formalism’,

and underscore his uncanny knack of declaring boldly that which his contemporaries

simply overlooked. Anyone who has spent time in the Middle Ages section of a

museum, surrounded by religious statuary and painting that was not only ubiquitous in its

day, but a manifestation of the social order and repository of its values, understands the

truth of McLuhan’s insight.

McLuhan made these pronouncements in the period during which humanities-based

media studies programs slowly took institutional form. Often beginning as film studies

programs, they hewed tightly to a textual bias inherited from literary studies, struggled
for legitimacy within the university by embracing an historicist and aesthetic agenda, and

clad themselves in the armor of high-powered (and jargon-rich) theory, staying in the

forefront of the intellectual trends of the day. It took time (and the leadership of the

French) for popular film such as Noir, Westerns and their ilk to appear in the American

research agenda; it took even more time for television to penetrate this bulwark. From

this perspective, McLuhan’s pronouncements of advertising’s cultural centrality were

absolutely at odds with media studies of his day, which took advertising as ephemeral,

ideologically tainted and categorically beyond the Pale. In retrospect, McLuhan was not

only correct; his mode of explication was in tune with the culture he wanted to reach.

Although McLuhan’s academic pedigree and wit equipped him to go head to head with

the most erudite humanist scholar, he chose the ad man’s vernacular and pithy one-liner,

amplifying his message through television and popular publications. And as a public

intellectual, he demonstrated his acute understanding of media with robustness largely

absent in mainstream media studies.

2.

Forgive an autobiographical indulgence. Thanks to my father’s eclectic reading habits, I

first stumbled across Understanding Media the year it was published, 1964, when I was

nearing the end of grade school. Ironically, this follow-up to the Mechanical Bride and

Gutenberg Galaxy began life in 1959 as a US National Association of Educational

Broadcasters’ commission for an 11th grade media studies curriculum. The NAEB

rejected McLuhan’s curricular plans, and he developed them into the book that marked

the start of my fascination with the media. From that point on, I followed McLuhan’s
work in ‘real time’. A few years later, thanks to a terrific high school history teacher,

things became complicated. I encountered E. P. Thompson’s History of the English

Working Class and Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society, setting me up for the debate

that would play out years later while I was in graduate school with the publication of

Williams’ Television: Technology and Cultural Form. By that point, I struggled to

reconcile the work of McLuhan, Harold Innis and Lewis Mumford, which I found

inspiring, with the work of Williams, which I found far more convincing. The social

specificity, and indeed, the cultural materialism Williams advocated had a profound

impact on me.

Still, full disclosure notwithstanding, McLuhan’s and Williams’ positions are more

complex than usually portrayed. Both share degrees in English literature from

Cambridge and an initial fascination with the Leavisite tradition. Both explored media at

the intersection of culture and technology, McLuhan through his Centre at the University

of Toronto and Williams in Television; each offered fundamental media-centric

alternatives to the text-centric approaches far more common in the period’s formation of

film studies; and each interrogated the relationship between media and community. But

the meanings of those conjoined words and interests differed profoundly and played out

in the domain of determinism, one technological and the other social, in nuanced and -

for the field - generative ways. McLuhan’s ‘instrumentally formalist’ approach conflated

‘medium’ with ‘technology’, evacuating any social or institutional agency, instead

positioning the social as an effect. Williams’ interest in the social institution of

technology, in culture as a practice, obviously offered a sharp counterpoint, as their

‘debate’ would spell out.

3.

Media studies owe much to these two figures for nudging our understanding of media

beyond the comfortable particularities of the text and restoring technology to the culture

mix. Whether conceptualized as social practices and institutions or as prostheses with

implications for the calculus of sensory perception, each view enables a notion of culture

that goes far beyond an invented tradition, and that brings with it distinct implications for

the question of community. Advertising, despite the critique it would receive in

Williams’ hands, is, ironically the enabling element in his understanding of broadcast

flow, constituting precisely those ‘differently related units’ whose timing is ‘undeclared’

and that replace the ‘programme series’. Williams considered flow ‘the defining

characteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form’,

and although his reasoning as so often differed from McLuhan’s, it’s not difficult to

understand the centrality of advertising to his views. As always, McLuhan made his case

pithily and provocatively, using the language of advertising recursively as the métier of

his intervention. Today’s logics of advertising, evident in AdSense, data tracking and

predictive algorithms, badly need a McLuhan and Williams to interrogate this latest

conjuncture of culture and technology and to dislodge the field from its comfort zone.

William Uricchio
Comparative Media Studies, MIT
uricchio@mit.edu
References

McLuhan, M (1953) Commonweal 58: 557.

McLuhan, M (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw

Hill, p. 232

McLuhan, M (1976) Advertising Age, Sep. 3.

Williams, R (2003/1974) Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge

Classics, p. 86