BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Ads as Art--Or, When Advertising Isn’t Just Advertising : ADCULT USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture by James B. Twitchell; Columbia University Press; $24.95, 296 pages

James Twitchell, a Florida University professor who specializes in popular culture, spent a great deal of time looking at and reading about advertisements to write “Adcult USA.” At one point he wangled a month’s stay at the J. Walter Thompson agency to see how it worked. He signed an agreement that he would not write anything derogatory about the organization or its clients. “I haven’t,” he tells us in the prefatory note.

Indeed he hasn’t. Lie down with dogs, as they say, and you will get up with fleas. Although Twitchell scratches now and then, for the most part he has little to report about the fleas other than what they might want to report of themselves. Hopping--flea-like, in fact--from one target of opportunity to the next, and from one argumentative side of the street to the other, the knowing, blithe and only intermittently skeptical Twitchell produces what, until almost the end, appears to be an extended commercial for the power and influence of advertising in America.

Citing and analyzing hundreds of ads--many of them reproduced in the book--Twitchell seems periodically to be on the verge of dealing with what is foreshadowed in his book’s subtitle: how advertising has affected our civilization and our character. “This is not a book about advertising but about culture--more specifically, about the culture created when advertising becomes not just a central institution but THE central institution,” the opening line goes.

The Federal Trade Commission--has it been abolished yet?--might have a question. “Adcult USA” never really performs what it promises. Twitchell makes large rhetorical claims for advertising’s images, comparing them at different points to ancient myth, to Renaissance art, to religion. But instead of developing the claims or speculating on what kind of new culture or new person advertising has created, Twitchell falls back from what he seems about to do, and returns to his histories, his examples and his statistics. This is not a book about culture but about advertising.

Of which Twitchell writes lucidly and sometimes wittily--”advertising is simply one of a number of attempts to load objects with meaning” and, jumping off from Milton, “If religion serves to justify the ways of God to man, advertising serves to justify the ways of things to people”--though without really departing from what others have written about the subject’s psychological and behavioral aspects.

“Adcult” relates a certain amount of history, a sketch or two of pioneers in the field, magazines’ shift from depending on circulation for revenue to depending on advertising, and using circulation to raise rates. It tells of radio’s shift from programming to sell radios to programming to sell ads. It tells at length about television, the various styles and objectives of commercials, sponsors’ pressures on content, and a great deal more, none of it really unfamiliar.

Where Twitchell does go beyond others who have written about advertising (will copywriters eventually be outnumbered by writers about copywriters?), is in the use of hype. Others have noted the verve, imagination and artistry of the best ads; others have speculated on its role in filling, or perhaps creating, the metaphysical vacuum of the times. Twitchell goes all out. He quotes John Updike telling the National Arts Club that commercial artists are rivaling the Irish monks who created the Book of Kells, and that television has made “every living room a cathedral.”

Twitchell wouldn’t know a tongue in a cheek if it poked through a hole at him; nor recognize Updike’s provocateur-work as the after-dinner speaker at Belshazzar’s Feast. He goes with it. Television jingles are the Gregorian chant of our day, he tells us. The stories generated by advertising “are what we have for modern myth.” And Giottos were simply the tail fins of the Renaissance.

Well, that may need development. Why, Twitchell asks, was there so much art in Renaissance Tuscany and so much advertising in 20th-century Manhattan? (Why, one might ask, is there so much mud in Vermont’s mud-season--and what is that stuff in the author’s eye? Could it be a wink?) Clearly, both were simply advertisements for wealthy patrons. Artists were hired to do a job; forget the myth of the lonely, unknown struggler. We do not know, Twitchell suggests, of one single unknown Renaissance artist. No, we don’t.

There is a kind of lazy point in all this; mainly a nudge at highbrows who pretend to see the difference between high culture and ad culture. I don’t know about pretend, though. Would Twitchell really want to spend as much time looking at his reproduction of the Absolut ad as at a reproduction of Piero della Francesca? He does tell us that Bach wrote the “Ode to Joy” and, without seeming to notice, he uses a quote that gives Figaro’s famous aria “Non Piu Andrai” (misspelled as “Mon Piu Andrai”) to “The Magic Flute.”