Howard Oakley
With Apple relying on creatives in the past to keep it going, it’s time it gave something back to the art world now it’s sitting on $40 billion.
If you had missed the brassy big band syncopation of Pearl and Dean’s Asteroid theme, it was sometimes easy to mistake a cinema ad for the feature. With the increasingly daring adventures of the man in black driven to deliver a box of chocolates to an absent lover, advertising shorts helped jump-start the careers of many. In the case of Cadbury’s 35-year Milk Tray campaign, this included Adrian Lyne, later director of 9 1/2 Weeks and Fatal Attraction. Before every cyclist’s pin-up Victoria Pendleton brought her peerless form to the Hovis TV adverts, Ridley Scott – of Thelma and Louise and Gladiator fame – directed its classics in 1973.
Generations earlier, posters and magazine ads had given gainful employment to the likes of Alfons Mucha, Toulouse-Lautrec, Norman Rockwell, Jan Sawka and the great John Gilroy, responsible for so much of Guinness’ brilliant artwork. Sometimes established artists have been propelled to fame when their work became product branding, as happened to Sir John Millais’ painting of Bubbles for Pears soap, and Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen for Dewar’s whisky.
Now that public funding of the arts is victim to the swing of the Chancellor’s scythe, we need to augment the work of charities such as the Art Fund (artfund.org). Ironically, advertising revenues have also supported the opposite end of the art market, in the rich collection of Charles Saatchi, of which a modest residue has been generously given to the nation. But fuelling inflated prices for contemporary art of dubious merit, and more obviously appreciated works of those long dead, does little to help those down to their last squeeze of ultramarine blue.
Curiously, the iPad’s gorgeous rendering of colour images offers a small ray of hope for some. Print publishers facing declining physical circulations may find their advertisers more prepared to invest in quality and quantity if they can sell electronic editions. In general, though, the rise of online advertising has stripped the art from ads, making search engine optimisation and cost per click count more than creativity.
Much of these new advertising revenues flow into the coffers of Google, owner of around 70% of the online market. Unlike its predecessors in the Industrial Revolution, art and cultural aspects of society figure as little in its ethos as they do in online advertising. Its philanthropic offspring Google.org has committed a meagre $100 million, a mere 1% of Google’s equity and profits, despite its parent reeling in around $2 billion (about £1.25 billion) each quarter in profit. In 2009, this pauper’s pot went towards clean energy, global health, information access and disaster relief: commendable goals in themselves, but a narrow investment for future generations.
By comparison, in 2009 the far more generous grants of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation put some $3 billion (about £1.9 billion) to tackle primarily health, education, and third world development – still no significant sums into the arts. While Apple has long provided assistance to educational organisations, neither it nor Steve Jobs appear to have any overt philanthropic commitment. With similar profits ($8 billion, about £5 billion, last year) to Google, and a $40 billion (about £25 billion) cash reserve, Apple has not yet found its way to put a few million dollars a year back into society.
Allow me to suggest a worthy cause, given that Apple survived in its leaner years largely on its sales to creatives and other artists: match Google.org’s modest if not miserly $100 million (about £68 million) per year in grants split evenly between academic computing, and initiatives to foster the arts.
