Art & Creativity Quote by Michael Schudson

Schudson’s line pulls off a neat reversal: advertising isn’t sanctified by museums, ministries, or the usual cultural gatekeepers, yet it functions as art in plain sight. The sting is in “official.” By foregrounding what advertising is not, he exposes how cultural legitimacy gets policed - not by aesthetic qualities alone, but by institutions that decide what counts. The quote is less a defense of commercials than an indictment of the social machinery that keeps “art” clean and “selling” dirty.

The subtext is classic sociologist: art is not a natural category; it’s a negotiated status. Advertising fails the purity tests because it is openly instrumental, tied to profit, measurement, and persuasion. But Schudson suggests that the very skills we praise in art - compression, symbolism, emotional engineering, world-building - are central to advertising’s craft. An ad has to do in 30 seconds what a novel can take 300 pages to attempt: create desire, identity, a mini-myth about who you could be after purchase. That’s aesthetic labor, even if its endgame is transactional.

Context matters: late-20th-century media culture had already blurred the line between culture and commerce, with brands acting like storytellers and artists borrowing the languages of the market. Schudson’s point lands as a provocation: if we can’t see the artistry in advertising, it may be because we’re protecting a comforting fiction - that art is where we go to escape persuasion, not where persuasion has simply learned to dress itself beautifully.