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1939. The Italian writer Elio Vittorini shows 16 illustrations for Olivetti. A speech about art and advertising: here it is.

“This series of illustrations constitutes an exception to current Italian advertising abroad and it requires a clarification. It has long been believed that advertising has to be done in a way that its very nature suggests.

What does advertising come from? It comes from needs, feelings or a calculation for self-affirmation. For centuries, people indulged in needs, in feelings, and calculation, all of this resulting in a brutal self-assertion. The problem of reaching goals, earning clients trust and drumming up new clients was faced only in terms of quantity. Since it was all about shouting, agencies shouted more insistently, shouted louder, again and again. And the more violent were the best ones: they entered the kingdom of heaven.

But as time passed by, this authoritarian style of advertising faced the dangers typical of a quantitative approach. E.g, human indifference. What then? Then you have to do what should have been done from the beginning. You have to turn quantity into quality. A person is quality. And if you want a show of strength to be vital and meaningful, then it has to be about humanity and quality. That’s why there has been a lot of talk about humanistic advertising in the US today. Nobody, of course, is stating that advertising should no longer be an act of affirmation. But it has to be affirmative while being qualifying. There should be a raison d’etre in it, something that justifies its existence in front of men and women.

And this raison d’etre cannot be but the same reason Art exists: the reason of no reason, a reason without purpose. Art for art’s sake. The illustrations you can see here were designed according to this principle. Their authors used affirmation just as a medium to convey meanings. They used the product as something to be turned into a picture, not as a dogma to be imposed. And they tried to establish linguistic correspondences between the product and other (freely chosen) elements which could draw the attention of imagination and play as freely with the each other as only a piece of poetry or a work of art can do.

Of course, there is a purpose beyond these illustrations, which is, ultimately, common to all advertisement. And yet, the authors tried to forget about this purpose: what they kept in mind was something which is way more straightforward: creating images that could lasts long in human imagination. This is the ambitious aim of poets and artists. But if only art can give quality to something, make it live long, bring it into existence, and commit people, then advertising has to be art”.

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