Accounting for Taste: Why It (Still) Matters

Advertising has long borrowed its power from art — and at its best, it does so not just to sell products, but to shape culture.

A visit to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh offers the thrill of encountering one of the twentieth century’s most influential artists in his hometown. The galleries give context to his formative years, including his time at Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Pictorial Design. But the real revelation comes when you encounter his earliest work: advertisements.

On display are examples of Warhol’s famous “December Shoes" campaign — whimsical, hand-drawn ads for women’s shoes that ran in national media. They were immediately celebrated for their wit and style, blending consumerism and art in ways that would later define the pop art movement itself.

AI & Rusty Shrimp Forks

While Warhol embraced automation in his studio, his work belongs to a moment before algorithms and machine learning. Today, we are living in an era in which generative AI is reshaping how advertising is made, and for many, there are reasons to be uneasy. Jeff Beer, who writes about advertising for Fast Company, recently compared the “slop” of algorithmic advertising to “an AI-generated fever dream in which we’re all forced to remove our own eyeballs with rusty shrimp forks.”

Warhol and others like him may offer some salve for Jeff — and the readers of Creative Salon as we squint through the AI haze. Commercial artists remind us what great advertising can accomplish, and why the industry may do its best work when it is populated by creative misfits and wits operating at the intersection of art, culture, craft, and commerce.

While Andy may have blurred the lines between advertising, art and commerce better than most, he was certainly not the first to bridge these worlds. As recently argued in Creative Salon, Salvador Dalí and the surrealists showed how dreams and strange imagery can tap into the consumer’s subconscious to sell mascara or nearly any other product.

Art & Copy

And before Warhol and Dali, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec revolutionized graphic art in the 19th century with his large-format poster for the Moulin Rouge cabaret. Overnight, Toulouse-Lautrec elevated advertising to the status of fine art. He captured the Paris nightlife and humanized marginalized figures like cabaret performers and sex workers, all while driving foot traffic to the night clubs that hired him. His celebrity-focused lithographs took the advertising industry by storm, with a Post-Impressionist style that laid the groundwork for modern graphic design, influencing both advertising and fine art for generations.

Like Toulouse-Lautrec, Norman Rockwell was a commercial artist whose illustrations would come to define mid-century American life. Harper's Monthly, Life, and most famously for The Saturday Evening Post all hired him to create cover art for their publications. He also created advertisements for brands such as Jell‑O and Listerine, and illustrated the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box. Rockwell captured — and helped shape — American identity through sentimental, carefully observed scenes of everyday life.

Even today, Rockwell’s imagery retains cultural force — so much so that its recent appropriation by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on social media sparked a widely reported backlash by his family, underscoring how these commercial icons still carry political and cultural meaning.

And while Rockwell and Warhol are household names, James Rosenquist offers the most physical example of the crossover between advertising and fine art. Beginning at age eighteen in the late 1950s, Rosenquist earned his living as a billboard painter, executing Phillips 66 signs on gas stations across the country. After surviving a horrifying fall from scaffolding high above New York streets, he abandoned billboard work and devoted himself to art. Applying sign‑painting techniques to monumental canvases, he adapted the visual language of advertising to fine art. Known as the “billboard Michelangelo,” his work now hangs in the Met, MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, the Guggenheim, and other major institutions.

Visual design, however, is only half of the story. Advertising’s other great creative engine is language.

Here’s a brief parlour game: what do F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Sayers, and Salman Rushdie have in common? All spent time as advertising copywriters.

Consider who wrote the following lines:

a.      "Look into the Mirror tomorrow — you'll like what you see" for The Daily Mirror

b.      "Brevity is the soul of lingerie" for Vogue Pattern Service

c.      "Guinness is Good for You" for Guinness

d.      "We keep you clean in Muscatine," for a steam laundry service based in Iowa

e.      "Advertising is a racket. Its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero," in a personal letter to his daughter

A hint for d & e: the author may have leveraged his (apparently fraught) time in the ad business to explain how one of his characters, born James Gatz, represents an act of rebranding when he adopted a new persona as a form of self-marketing. (The other answers: a: Rushdie; b: Parker; c: Sayers.)

Craft & Taste

If the advertising industry is intent on gripping Jeff Beer’s rusty shrimp forks, perhaps there is something enduring to learn from Jay Gatsby. The tension between fine art and commercial work has long generated creative energy, especially when people who value craft and taste are given room to work.

These artists and writers – and many others like them – learned essential skills in their commercial work: visual impact, speed, economy of language, and respect for deadlines. Rosenquist said that sign painting constituted a modern version of working in an old master's workshop, learning craft from veteran painters. In 1928, Dorothy Sayers famously worked with artist John Gilroy to develop the Guinness Toucan, who continues to grace Guinness beer promotions to this day.

All these artists had an ability to take commercial techniques and apply them to work with deeper meaning across social commentary, emotional truth, or aesthetic innovation that transcended selling products. Their understanding of taste and culture elevated their work in both worlds — fine art and commerce.

Perhaps the anxiety swirling around AI-generated advertising is not really about machines replacing creativity. It is about what happens when taste, judgment, and cultural understanding are removed from the process. The commercial artists of the past remind us that advertising does its most meaningful work when it is shaped by people who care deeply about craft and consequence. It's about knowing the place of AI, as the accelerator and enabler, not the creator.

The fine art of advertising is not a lost tradition — it is an active choice, even as the tools evolve.

Thomas Cunningham is the former head of communications for IPG