Art as a medium for creating an advertising image: Andy Warhol and Calvin Klein

The author explores the use of a work of art as a certain combination of social and cultural realities in advertising on the example of Andy Warhol’s “Elvis (Eleven times)” in a Calvin Klein campaign. The case clearly illustrates creation of a composition via drawing conventional horizontal and vertical lines, setting the mood, sought by the brand, for perception of the shot. The reference to this particular work of art underlines both the architecture and the atmosphere it enhances. In addition to the visual narration, the brand’s advertisement uses some text, a legend to the photo, as a guideline for a viewer to grasp the embedded senses. In a couple of parallel phrases, the legend draws some equations between Warhol and his work and Calvin Klein and its products, fixing in the mind and the social and cultural space of a viewer precise associations of the promoted items with classics.