Brain Surgery

Mark Fenske did amazing work as a powerhouse writer and creative director. I don’t remember when he wrote this essay, or where it appeared. All I know is that I’ve kept it for decades and it’s often reminded me to focus on craft in the face of on-rushing deadlines. Mr. Fenske is now a professor at VCU Brandcenter in Richmond, VA.

This is not brain surgery. You can learn brain surgery.

Advertising is different from plumbing, surveying or piloting the space shuttle. As different as Baywatch is from church or field hockey from sushi. It’s more like being a nun than accounting is. Much more like spelunking than being President. To simplify it into a line you can tell your parents when they ask what it is to work in advertising—we’re artists who get paid.

Which is what makes advertising both difficult to understand and fun to do. Because we get paid there’s an expectation that we do things in an orderly fashion. That we’re businesslike. Most of the meetings occur in offices stocked with copiers and staplers. The hallways of agencies are full of people moving papers around that represent time and money. And yet it’s not business at all when you sit down to write an ad. Faced with a blank sheet of paper (the white bull as Hemingway put it) the person being paid to fill it has no useful instinct except that of an artist to move him forward.

To create an ad something springs from inside a person that is the same as what in painters brings out a line on a canvas or in a sculptor makes him chisel away at the rock to show what will be.

What we do when we do ads may live in a business world, may lunch on business expense accounts, but is, when the time comes to manufacture it, art. And art, in case you’re not up on such things, plays by its own rules.

There are no rules about what’s good art. No, that not exactly true. There are rules. But nobody’s sure who makes them. There’s no way to tell if you’re following them. They change all the time. And the only sure way to achieve high-level success is to break the rules. But that only works sometimes, and not often.

In fact, very little work finds success at all whether it follows rules or faults them. At times the amount of labor it takes to create an ad drives its creators to push and push and push to have it just be seen. Even by only two people. And often even that doesn’t happen. Nobody ends up seeing what it took all day or all week to do. This is advertising. Welcome to the same kind of days Michelangelo used to have.

We could go on and on. But I’m leading only to a small observation: An education in an art form does not consist of learning a series of steps that when executed in the proper order result in the student becoming a master of the form. There is no formula. There is no moment when you get it. The writer/art director/strategist/artist remains a naive beginner his entire working life. You never graduate from the feeling you don’t know what you’re doing. No one does. Relax.