Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [131]
Some days, Goodby receives as many as five hundred portfolios and job requests, many from places like the VCU Brandcenter. But on that day Canfield did something that I suspect even Mark Fenske would approve of: he looked for magic in unexpected places.
Exiting the Nincompoop Forest
Advertising is a paradox because it attracts some of the most creative minds in the world, rebels and idealists, original thinkers and gifted artists, and asks them to produce something that will convince people that they need to buy or do something that they usually do not want, need, or care about. On top of that, these creative minds will be forced to operate under conditions that are the enemy of most art: mandatory guidelines for elements that must or must not be said or shown. And once it is submitted, the fate of the work they so passionately crafted, whether it will live or die, is often put in the hands of others, of clients and consumers.
I had been meaning to ask Fenske about his contention that advertising is art. Actually, I’d wanted to ask him about it fourteen years ago. I wanted to ask him this afternoon in class, and now, sitting at a table at the Irish bar Sine in Richmond’s Shockoe Slip area, I wanted to ask again. But I didn’t.
Later that night, while we talked at various Richmond bars, and even later on the steps of the Thomas Jefferson–designed capitol building, I still thought about it. But again, instead of discussing ads, we talked about books and history. At one point, in a bar across the street from a former home of Robert E. Lee’s, Fenske remarked that we had spoken more in this one afternoon and evening than in the entire year we had worked together.
I said this was true. At first he had resisted me, and because of that I had resisted him.
Another question I’d been asking everyone during my visit to the Brandcenter was whether advertising can be taught. Which is a stupid question, I realize. Can advertising be taught? Can writing be taught? Can goodness or humility be taught?
However, this did occur to me while sitting in Fenske’s class, watching his students watch him: The ultimate value of a teacher isn’t just teaching rote principles and facts for memorization. It is recognizing an innate and untapped ability that resides within a student and helping him or her determine whether it is something he or she might grow to love. Plato wrote in The Symposium that one of the greatest privileges of a human life is to become midwife to the birth of the soul in another. My sister Karen, with an assist from the creators of Bewitched, did this for me. I’d like to think that Fenske did the same with the kid drawing a cartoon late that night.
More important than wondering whether something can be taught is the fact that people care enough to try to learn it.
While I was writing this, I shot Fenske an e-mail, asking a few too many follow-up questions, including, finally, a request for his response to the art question. His typed reply was akin to a groan. He said he’d give it some thought, but I realize now that his answer doesn’t matter anymore.
It doesn’t matter whether I think advertising is art. What matters is whether its creator does.
* This, of course, is subjective, as there are several other quality ad schools that time and funds prevented me from visiting. But in 2007, Creativity magazine named the twelve-year-old program the country’s best ad school, BusinessWeek ranked it among the worlds top design schools, and, more important, based on portfolios I’d screened and people I’d met over the years, I’d always felt that the Adcenter/Brand-center was the best in the country, too.
Afterword
Who Do I Think I Am?
During the year and a half I spent researching and writing this, I was often asked, usually by people