Can a commercial ever truly be considered art?

If you’re a fan of Mad Men like me, you know how much can go into an advertisement. That show is all about the way advertisers mine our personal lives, hopes, fears, and deepest desires to sell us products. It’s genius. And some ad pitches are truly moving, like when Don shows a slideshow of his family memories in a pitch for the Kodak «Carousel.» But, outside of the world of Mad Men, can commercials ever become art in the way that a film or a painting could be? That’s a question that came up when Grubhub, the food delivery app, dropped a teaser for their Super Bowl commercial, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the mind behind the Oscar-nominated film Bugonia and the Oscar-winning film Poor Things. When the teaser dropped on Twitter, the reactions were mixed. 

Some saw the ad as a common avenue for directors to make a couple of bucks. Turns out it’s hard to make money in filmmaking, especially as somewhat of an indie darling. Directors should be allowed to exercise their right to work gigs for cash… actors do that all the time. But some were put off by treating the commercial like it was going to be some kind of artistic event, especially by dropping a «trailer.» Should trailers exist for advertisements, something that we probably don’t really want to watch anyway? When we start treating commercials like art, we fall into a dangerous cycle that ends up devaluing art itself.