Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political Artifact, Commodity

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Top Highlights

• lithography–by Senefelder in the early nineteenth century

• Posters are not simply public notices

• Still, even when the information it carries concerns many people, rather than a few or just one, a public notice is not the same as a poster.

• address the person not as an individual, but as an unidentified member of the body politic

• poster

• modern concept of the public

• members of a society are defined primarily as spectators and consumers.

• A public notices aims to inform or command

• A poster aims to seduce, to exhort, to sell, to educate, to convince, to appeal

• alert

• distributes

• reaches out

• passive

• A poster claims attention–at a distance. It is visually aggressive.

• Posters are aggressive because they appear in the context of other posters.

• competing with (and sometimes reinforcing) each other

• an integral element of modern public space

• public space as an arena of signs

• redefinitions of the citizen and of public space

• technical and aesthetic qualities