Diaries for Ad's Sake

I’ve had a plan for a long time to collect some of the thinking from this newsletter and turn it into a book. It’s exactly the sort of long, drawn out process that honestly suits the tempo of my life at the moment.

I wish I had the energy and time to write here more often, but I think I’d rather spend what scant opportunities I do have to write about this subject, in the pursuit of something less dependant on consistent publishing.

For those who have perhaps joined recently, this endeavour originally started out as a podcast called Kunst Please, where I told short stories about art.

Kunst Please is a micro-dose of modern art history. An exploration into the more unexpected side of modern and contemporary art, featuring stories of the famous and the infamous, the weird and the wonderful, the unheard, the cult, the criminally overlooked and the criminally insane.

I fused this with my day job in advertising and created “Art for Ad’s Sake” which was originally just an hour long presentation where I spoke about six artists whose techniques and/or manifestos had really great applications for advertising creatives.

This Substack then followed and those six initial artists ballooned into a whole lot more and were accompanied by a bunch of other stuff.

A book has always been the end goal, but it’s not going to be just a collection of the blog posts.

I want to go back and re-interrogate a selection of them, with a view to writing something more like essays on each theme.

My aim is to create an art book that’s too dumb to be taken seriously by the art establishment, that is also an advertising book that'll be deemed too clever-clogs for the advertising establishment.

Finding a perfect middlebrow audience who exist to sip at the cortado of cultural capital aka. a double-shot of strong, bitter cultural theory topped with the creamy textures of thicky-thicky dumb-dumbness.

Bliss.

Anyway, I’ve seen a trend whereby people talk and post transparently about the books they are writing, and I thought perhaps I could use this ‘sletter to keep me honest.

So let’s start with an intro.

Next time I’ll share some thoughts on structure and chapters.

The central tenet of this book is that a greater awareness of modern and contemporary art can greatly enhance the work of commercial creativity.

Art like advertising is quite simple, but it is thoroughly overcomplicated by those who seek to profit financially and intellectually by making it more opaque and impenetrable.

That’s not to say that making advertising more artistic is the answer, but the concepts, manifestos, techniques and decisions taken by the artists in this book could be noticeably useful to those who work in and around advertising and marketing.

I say ‘noticeably’ because this is a noticing book not an instructional book.

It’s not a textbook.

It’s not a manual, or a lesson.

It’s not a “How to X the Y when you’re a Z” book.

This is not part of a curriculum.

What follows are essays about artists and observations about advertising.

It’s an archive of modern art designed to inspire modern creativity.

It’s Art for Ad’s Sake.

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More to come…

Like, comment and subscribe etc.

Jonathan ✌️

Another experiment is on the way, specifically designed to help parents make a judgement call on what art they want to keep and what art can be thrown away or recycled.

Follow the Instagram for updates.