Sublime

‘Most good copywriters’, says William Maynard of the Bates agency, ‘fall into two categories. Poets. And killers. Poets see an ad as an end. Killers as a means to an end.’ If you are both killer and poet, you get rich.

Maurice Denis wrote his manifesto The Definition of Neo-Traditionalism in the summer of 1890, it began with one of the canonical phrases of modernism: that “a picture – before being a warhorse, a nude woman, or some sort of anecdote – is essentially a surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order.”

Vilém Flusser

rather the remaking of attention into repetitive operations and responses that always overlap with acts of looking or listening. It is less the homogeneity of media products that perpetuates the separation, isolation, and neutralization of individuals than the larger and compulsory arrangements within which these elements, and many others, are

firm whose practice-mix was made up predominantly of clients who, rather than needing the profession’s most creative talent, wanted to find a firm that had accumulated experience in handling certain types of problems, and would not take an expensive “start with a blank sheet of paper” approach to the problem.