ABSTRACT
Advertising is a highly visible form of public culture, as conspicuous in its absence – as when advertising is removed from a metro station or a sporting event venue temporarily – as it is in its apparent ever-presence.1
Without advertising, space is refigured and opens up a glimpse of what feels like a quite different society. Advertising is at once a quite ordinary feature of everyday life, even a reassuring one, while being at the same time a perennially ‘alien’ communication, nagging in the name of particularities (urging this or that product or brand) and in so doing, when we pause for thought, opening up reflection on some of the general features of culture and the market economy. Academic critics have characteristically taken frequent pauses for such thoughts; about adverts one by one, and about what this form of communication does and represents within broader socio-economic and cultural processes.
