Art and Double Standards

             In history, art was created mainly for the male audience. We see many paintings of women, a lot of them nude. They have beautiful porcelain skin and a voluptuous figure that draws attention from the male viewer. People today consider these paintings to be highly idolized. They possess beauty and elegance, without being too graphic. When we look at women in advertisements however, the view changes. Not many people look at advertisements and see a form of art. I was one of those people until this past week. After learning about what advertisements portray and what they try to facilitate to the viewer, I began to realize the amount of depth they actually possess. 

            This is what I think most people skip over, which is why advertisements are not considered a higher form of art like fine arts. In a fine arts image, people have to figure out for themselves what the image is trying to portray. There are usually no words associated with the image except for the title (which is usually next to it in a tiny print that no one can see until getting up close to the image on display). This brings me to another point- many fine arts images are on display in museums or galleries, meaning people have to voluntarily go there to see them, or the real thing at least. This already puts the image on some kind of a pedestal in the viewer’s mind. If the image is good enough to be in a museum, it must be good. Advertisements, on the other hand, are readily accessible to anyone and everyone. Flip open a magazine and you see too many to count. Drive down the street and you’ll see a bunch plastered on buildings and billboards. You can literally hold an advertisement in your hand, rip it up and throw it away.

            This leads me into my discussion on women in advertisements. Because of the simple fact that ads are more easily accessible, the value of them and the images they possess automatically decrease. The woman in an ad may be the same woman in a fine arts painting, but she is unconsciously going to be perceived differently by the viewer. Women in advertisements are the epitome of what the female viewer wants to look like, and what the male viewer wants to have. They are considered the “beautiful” of today’s society. The woman in an ad is trying to sell an experience to the viewer, but is also creating a standard for what people need to look like or have to get that experience, which has the power to affect the viewer’s self-image. Rarely, if ever, does someone look at a painting and think, “If I only looked like her…” This is because the painting is not trying to sell something to you or make you look a certain way. The painting is just there for you to look at and interpret in your own way. This is why I think women in paintings are idolized, because they represent the more normal person, which the viewer can relate to. A woman in an ad is just another woman that the viewer can look at, but there is no connection with her in the ad itself. The woman in a painting TELLS a story, while the woman in an advertisement SELLS a story.