Art History & Advertising

I'm 25, I graduated just over 2 years ago from a difficult 4 years at university (studying Japanese and History of Art), and I'm now working in media as an account exec. 

My day to day routine keeps me socialising, relatively happy, but not fully flexed. I have creative juices that are forming sad little puddles, ready to evaporate, and about once a week I can't help but wonder if I'm dumber than I was 3 years ago. 

I'm starting this blog to keep my mind moving. It's all part of my New Year New Me attitude. If it aint fixed, un-break it. 

I fell into media after a brief fling with Brand consultancy (well - more like office management at a brand consultancy. Ya gal spent 9 months ordering toilet roll and making coffees, which, even for the remnants of teenage-low-self-esteem me, was low). My partner was working in media, he was having a great time, and I decided I wanted in on all the lunches, parties, and drinking-on-a-Thursdays.
There's a lot more to it than the aforementioned lunching though - the work is hard and demands both an incredible amount of social energy paired with unwavering attention to detail and familiarity with numbers. Working in media makes me more organised, sociable, engaged, and attuned to the slight shifts in human behaviour year-on-year, month on month, and day-to-day. 

What it doesn't give me is the room to make leaps and bounds from one idea to the next, to daydream my way from a hypothesis to a painting, or room to inspire huge arguments on race, sexuality, gender and politics from a single brush-stroke. When your workday demands that 0.000001% of a change from one creative asset to the next is noted and utilised in your next round of optimisation, there isn't much room for the huge leaps of faith that I flirted with daily while studying art history.

This blog is going to be my attempt to draw the two together. I dreamed it up when I saw the now infamous 'Are You Beach Body Ready' adverts on the tube, huge garish yellow posters demanding that commuters confront their lack of similarity to the tall, sculpted figure of the model in front of them, all the while considering if they had the money and the desire to restrict their diet to powder-based protein shakes for the next few months. The direct call to a viewer to confront their own voyeurism, to contrast their physical appearance with the image before them, and the desire of self change it might awaken within some all seemed so apt for investigation. Not with numbers and spreadsheets of ROI and engagement, though, but with words and histories and canons. We'll see if it works.