released 11/27/2020
In a modest effort to exorcize the spirit of Black Friday, Ken Myers presents five archive interviews about the cultural role of advertising in American life. The guests are: sculptor Ted Prescott, who talks about the differences between nudity in art and nakedness in ads; cultural historian Jackson Lears, discussing his book Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in Americas; media critic Mark Crispin Miller on how advertising focuses on self-image more than the actual benefits of a product; James Twitchell, on his book AdCult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture; and historian Pamela Walker Laird on how late-nineteenth-century ads relied on myths of progress.
53 minutes
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