@mastersthesis {12181,
	title = {Your Art Here: Print Advertisements and Contemporary Art, 1964-1974},
	year = {2015},
	school = {IFA/NYU},
	abstract = {Emboldened by the cultural appropriations of Pop art, many artists in the 1960s and 1970s began directly interposing their work into the pages of mass media publications. Numerous scholars have tracked this avant-garde trend from a sanctioned, executive perspective, studying magazines like Avalanche-run for and by artists-or editorial essays such as Dan Graham{\textquoteright}s Homes for America-crafted for Arts Magazine in 1966. Few historians, however, have recognized the equal importance and prevalence of a parallel infiltrational practice during this period: the artist-generated print advertisement. This dissertation remedies this gap in knowledge by establishing {\textquoteright}ad art{\textquoteright} as a paradigmatic vehicle for postwar artists to expound upon critical themes in their oeuvre and foster incisive, often satirical, dialogues on the foremost issues of the day.
Relying heavily on primary source research, artist interviews, formal analysis and social art historical context, this dissertation aims to be an extensive study of the key progenitors of ad art and their work during the medium{\textquoteright}s formative first decade. As such the dissertation is divided into three main sections: chapter one concerns the advertisements of Yoko Ono, Ray Johnson and Terry Fugate-Wilcox who critiqued the growing commodification of art with conceptualism, crafting elaborate imaginary galleries that existed only in one{\textquoteright}s mind and within the borders of various print ads; chapter two considers the announcements of Southern California artists Ed Ruscha, Judy Chicago and Bruce Conner as divergent responses to the prevailing machismo of Angelino culture in the 1960s; finally, chapter three reveals the complex production and reception behind Lynda Benglis{\textquoteright}s infamous 1974 Artforum ad, positioning the spread as a cutting satire of the commercial and intellectual hegemony of the magazine, alongside a timely mockery of feminism, gender and sexuality in contemporary art. Taken in concert, these case studies reveal fresh insights into the work of established and unknown artists alike to demonstrate how the understudied medium of ad art served as a vital tool to challenge postwar cultural norms.},
	keywords = {Twentieth-Century Art},
	author = {Wright, Katharine}
}
