advertising, propaganda, or art?

 more new stuff from the studio. today it is the stencils i began working on over the weekend. i've been sort of enthralled with advertising for a while now, and i've been appropriating images from old ads into my work. in the past, i've focused mostly on the 'mad men' era of ad images, and i did make a new image from that generation of ads. but then i started looking at older stuff in the art nouveau era and before. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec is a favorite and i felt like his image/language concepts could be recontextualized into some of my work, so i made a stencil of one of his famous images of jane avril. the images here are all works in progress. i'm still lacking language in these pieces, but i'm working on that.

beyond the advertising images themselves, i've been studying information psychology and marketing and the effects of advertising on choice. this manipulative field of study is quite fascinating to me, in the idea that the products being advertised become a secondary point to the access achieved through the ad. the mind tricks and hidden subliminal messages that get us to behave in a way that can be predicted is a key point of interest for me, especially as i see art and advertising truly merging into something that is indiscernibly one thing; something meant to affect as place-taker for the actual product or idea, but when it comes to selling something what's the difference between tangible and intangible sales. this is why we buy brands, more so than products. i don't have a cell phone, i have an iPhone. i don't eat cereal, i eat cheerios. i don't drive a car, i drive a chevy. so on and so forth. so what is really being sold to us is an image, not a product, but typically it is an image of how we perceive ourselves. what man doesn't want to smell like nature; thanks old spice. it's quite concerning when you think about corporate ownership and brand making alongside an idea of population control and propaganda. advertising is always propaganda. propaganda is proliferated by those seeking the power to control people. should corporations, or anyone for that matter, have that kind of access to your mind?