Culture as Weapon
The Art of Influence in Everyday Life
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
One of the country's leading activist curators explores how corporations and governments have used art and culture to mystify and manipulate us.
The production of culture was once the domain of artists, but beginning in the early 1900s, the emerging fields of public relations, advertising and marketing transformed the way the powerful communicate with the rest of us. A century later, the tools are more sophisticated than ever, the onslaught more relentless.
In Culture as Weapon, acclaimed curator and critic Nato Thompson reveals how institutions use art and culture to ensure profits and constrain dissent--and shows us that there are alternatives. An eye-opening account of the way advertising, media, and politics work today, Culture as Weapon offers a radically new way of looking at our world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The latest from art critic Thompson (Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century) chronicles the ever-increasing complexity and ubiquity of ads and artworks that manipulate people into purchasing an item or accepting an ideology. Beginning with an anecdote-heavy history of the golden age of advertising, Thompson reveals that companies increasingly stopped trying to market a product and turned toward marketing a social experience, a trend exemplified by Apple, Ikea, and Starbucks. Thompson compellingly suggests that selling a product and selling an ideology have historically applied disconcertingly similar tactics; indeed, the advertising firm behind the wildly successful Volkswagen Beetle ad campaign of the late 1950s later produced the famous "Daisy" campaign ad for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Thompson's approach emphatically hews to the left, recalling the politics of Howard Zinn and Naomi Klein, and he treats the term "culture" very broadly. The book is an energetic, briskly paced, and well-researched polemic that avoids clich and succeeds in raising awareness of the cultural forces that shape brand preferences and political allegiance.
