XXI

THE EFFECT OF DISPLAY

If we turn from the simple newspaper advertisement to the means of propaganda in general, we at once stand before a question which is often wrongly answered.  The practical handbooks of advertisements and means of display treat it as a self-evident fact that every presentation should be as beautiful as possible.  In the first place, we cannot deny that the ugly and even the disgusting possess a strong power for attracting attention.  Yet it is true that by a transposition of feelings the displeasure in the advertisement may easily become a displeasure in the advertised object.  But, on the other hand, it is surely a mistake to believe that pure beauty best fulfills the function of the advertisement.  Even the draftsman who draws a poster ought to give up the ambition to create a perfect picture.  It might have the power to attract attention, but it would hardly serve its true purpose of fixing the attention on the article which is advertised by the picture.  The very meaning of beauty lies in its self-completeness.  The beautiful picture rests in itself and does not point beyond itself.  A really beautiful landscape painting is an end in itself, and must not stir up the practical wish to visit the landscape which has stimulated the eye of the painter.  If the display is to serve economic interests, every line and every curve, every form and every color, must be subordinated to the task of leading to a practical resolution, and to an action, and yet this is exactly the opposite of the meaning of art.  Art must inhibit action, if it is perfect.  The artist is not to make us believe that we deal with a real object which suggests a practical attitude.  The aesthetic forms are adjusted to the main aesthetic aim, the inhibition of practical desires.  The display must be pleasant, tasteful, harmonious, and suggestive, but should not be beautiful, if it is to fulfill its purpose in the fullest sense.  It loses its economic value, if by its artistic quality it oversteps the boundaries of that middle region of arts and crafts.  This of course stands in no contradiction to the requirement that the advertised article should be made to appear as beautiful as possible.  The presentation of something beautiful is not necessarily a beautiful presentation, just as a perfectly beautiful picture need not have something beautiful as its content.  A perfect painting may be the picture of a most ugly person.

We have not yet spoken of the suggestive power of the means of propaganda.  Every one knows the influence on taste and smell, on social vanity, on local pride, on the gambling instinct, on the instinctive fear of diseases, and above all on the sexual instinct, can gain suggestive power.  Everywhere among the uncritical masses such appeals reach individuals whose psychophysical attitudes make such influences vivid and overpowering.  Every one knows, too, those