The patrimonialization process of advertising : from scorn and mistrust to documentary heritage, archive, and history

Abstract

This short essay aims at tracing the patrimonialization process of advertising from the 19th century to nowadays. The process followed third steps. First, advertising evolved from a despised object to a valuable cultural artifact. Considered as useless or deceitful in first place, advertising has gradually managed to gain legitimacy as a useful and even necessary tool for both companies that want to sell their products and for consumers in search of information, and finally as a cultural artifact and a work of art worthy of being collected or entering museums or exhibitions (from French poster designers such as Jules Chéret or Toulouse-Lautrec to the creative revolution in the 1960s or the more recent exhibitions Goudemalion at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2012). This process of recognition is mainly due to the efforts made by advertisers who participate in the profesionalization process of their activities at the time. The second and more recent step, from a cultural object to an archive, raises such sensible issues as collecting and preserving advertisements; digitization (digitized/digital-born ads; methods and tools); metadata and semantic. As a specific archive, torn between abundance and scarcity or unequal quality of data, it requires a specific literacy from archivists who need to be trained for that purpose. The case of Duke University will serve to illustrate these questions. The last step from an available archive to a historical material also requires a special literacy for historians to build databases and corpora, to identify and select the accurate documents, to choose the appropriate methodology and tools to examine and interpret this specific material. Finally, the question of whether and how to use advertising as a material to imagine new forms of historical narratives (visual or digital narratives, vi- tual exhibits) will be explored. Last but not least, we will examine the transformation of ads in the last decade through digital approaches, the impact of digitization on copyright and on the preservation and study of advertising.