Image Making--The Art of the ‘80s : Have Politicians, Artists and Entertainers All Gone Madison Avenue? : The problem with today’s sophisticated image-making machinery is that it doesn’t just sell films, pop stars and politicians--it often radically alters their message too.

Michael Jackson surgically deracinates his face--so drastically altering his nose, chin and eyes that he appears to be half-man, half-alien.

A walking advertisement for herself, literary brat-packer Tama Janowitz is in the back of almost every magazine, serving as a pitchwoman for Amaretto di Saronno.

Eager to negate the wimp factor, George Bush quotes from “Dirty Harry” in his Republican convention acceptance speech. Anxious to show he’s tough on defense, rival Michael Dukakis stages photo opportunities of him riding in an Army tank.

Not content with sell-out crowds, the theater blockbuster “Les Miserables: The Musical Sensation” merchandises everything from T-shirts and souvenir books to watches, magnets and beach towels.

What’s the connection here? Simple--everybody is marketing themselves. Call it advertising, packaging or just plain hucksterism. But image making has become the art form of the ‘80s.

Marketing is a distinctly modern phenomenon. Pioneered by primitive show-biz impresarios like P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill, it thrives in competitive, classless societies that eagerly seek access to information, value expanded leisure time and express fresh ideas through art and fashion. In recent years, Hollywood and Madison Avenue have emerged as the world’s leading marketing assembly lines, their wizardly powers increasingly intertwined.

The problem with today’s sophisticated image-making machinery is that it doesn’t just sell films, pop stars and politicians--it often radically alters their message too. In Hollywood, film makers routinely test-screen new movies to see which endings play best with frequent filmgoers. The result? Crowd-pleasing finales.

In presidential politics, packaging defines virtually all campaign rhetoric. Thanks to our media-wise politicians’ obsession with image making, today’s key issues are ones that reach voters through symbols and emotions, not reason and intellect. Accordingly, the campaign has been defined by symbolic issues (the Pledge of Allegiance, the L-word and crime), not truly relevant ones (the deficit, new taxes, education or foreign policy).

What makes this obsession with packaging and merchandising particularly unsettling is how it can distort our emotional responses to an artist’s work. It’s one thing for Michael Jackson to take his hit song “Billie Jean,” sell it to the highest bidder (Pepsi-Cola) and convert it into a soft-drink jingle. But what was once an eerie, erotic pop mystery--perhaps the tale of a jilted lover, perhaps a confession of sexual confusion--has been permanently robbed of its artistic power. Can the day be far away when someone rents out “America the Beautiful” to sell aluminum siding?

Since the fabled 1960 Kennedy-Nixon TV debate, presidential politics has become our most intensely packaged affair. What’s important isn’t so much policy but how you package the policy. Hence the Reagan “Teflon” presidency. Reporters, and departing White House staff members, have chronicled an Administration in disarray, describing a President who apparently was lazy, uninformed, completely disengaged. The public reads these accounts but was far more swayed by the Administration’s carefully constructed media image. Whenever the President was on TV or pictured in the paper, he was so engaged (hosting visits by world leaders), so virile (chopping wood at the ranch), that his charismatic performance obliterated the bad reviews.

Describing the Reagan Administration’s news management philosophy, former deputy White House press secretary Leslie Janka said, “The whole thing was P.R. This was a P.R. outfit that took over the country. . . . The Constitution forced them to do things like make a budget, run foreign policy and all that. But their first, last and overarching activity was public relations.”

Today we have the Politics of Photo Opportunities. The presidential campaign is an orchestrated made-for-TV event, consisting of speeches (geared for 20-second network news bites) and flurries of TV commercials, which are not about issues or ideals (or even character ) but about other TV commercials! On the defensive throughout the campaign, Dukakis first aired commercials attacking Bush’s packaging team, and more recently, lambasted Bush’s anti-Dukakis TV ads by showing portions of Bush’s own commercials , hoping to somehow give them a negative spin.

Is it any wonder that novelist Joan Didion, out on the campaign trail, was struck by how reminiscent the carefully scripted events were of . . . a movie set! “There was the hierarchy of the set: There were actors, there were directors, there were script supervisors, there were grips,” she wrote recently. “A final victory, for the staff and the press on a traveling campaign, would mean not a new production but only a new location: the particular setups and shots of the campaign day (the walk on the beach, the meet-and-greet at the housing project) would fade imperceptibly, the isolation and the arrogance and the tedium all intact, into the South Lawns, the Oval Office signings. . . .”

Marketing is no longer just a sales strategy--it has developed its own aesthetic. Film festivals screen all-night tributes to TV commercials. The most valued presidential advisers are ad men with Coke commercials under their belts.

“In the ‘80s, the movies don’t aspire to being art anymore--they’re just slop, because they’re such of a prisoner of test-marketing strategies that they’re afraid to say anything or offend anybody,” said director Robert Altman, whose “Tanner: 1988” was a political image-making satire that ran on HBO during the presidential primaries.

“Can you imagine Dashiel Hammett asking his pulp-magazine fans to vote on the end of his mysteries? Do you think Picasso should’ve consulted his public about changing his paintings? I can just see him nodding and saying, ‘Oh sure, let’s move the eye over to that side.’ ”

Propelled by media that revel in celebrity imagery and garish self-promotion, image making doesn’t just sell art or politicians--it shapes many of our attitudes about them. Thanks to the instantaneous power of marketing imagery, we have a consumer audience that values style over substance, self-invention over sincerity, confession over creativity.

All this inspires an intriguing riddle: In the ‘80s, who’s the true visionary--the artist as entrepreneur or entrepreneur as artist?

“In a lot of ways, we’ve become hypnotized by hype,” says Joe Sedelmaier, the TV commercial director whose Kafka-esque comic spirit has buoyed Federal Express, Wendy’s and Alaska Air ads. “It’s not just that the marketing has become more important than the product. The artist has become more important than his art.

“Andy Warhol made a whole career out of it--people were more fascinated by his life--which was all image--than by anything he ever did. Sometimes I think it’s scary. Then I figure--what the hell--if they let an actor be President, why can’t they make marketing an art form?”

Nowhere has marketing and artistry achieved more synchronicity than on MTV, a sleek Videoland amusement park where it’s impossible to tell who’s the performer and who’s the product. The video channel’s splashy collage of images has influenced everything from TV commercials and Hollywood blockbusters to election-year ads and fast-food news shows like “West 57th.” Call it pop culture at the speed of light.

MTV has been the proving ground of the marketing revolution. For Madison Avenue, MTV is the Promised Land--it’s TV’s first all-commercial channel. Everything is an ad--the 3-minute videos advertise pop records, the 30-second commercials tout the clothes you should wear while listening to them. Better yet, the videos don’t just advertise the product--they manipulate our response to it. MTV sculpts performers’ images--transforming ZZ Top from homely hayseeds to outer-space hipsters, turning George Michael from a teeny-bop bimbo to a silky seducer.

Image making has also become an essential political tool for running the country. Aware that network correspondents rely on footage of the President, White House adviser Michael Deaver not only chose what story reporters would report but controlled the visuals that would accompany it. It was the ultimate marketing triumph--he used the networks’ own news footage to sell his message.

“We would take a theme--say the economy,” Deaver told Mark Hertsgaard, author of “On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency.” “The President would say the same thing, but we had a different visual for every stop. They see the President out at an auto plant because imports are down and American cars are up. They see the President at a high-tech plant because high-tech means jobs. Pretty soon it begins to soak in, pretty soon people begin to believe the economy is getting better.”

MTV’s formula works in much the same way--the ability to construct and project a stylish personality has become far more important than any vision a pop star might actually have. After all, why should marketing be solely reserved for products? Perhaps taking a cue from Michael Jackson, who radically altered his physiognomy and landed a $15-million contract to promote Pepsi-Cola (a product he doesn’t even drink!), Hollywood stars have been skipping acting class and going to the body shop. Nautilus. Nip ‘n tuck. Face-lifts. Breast implants. Liposuction. Even lip implants!

What a novel marketing wrinkle--surgery as a career move. Even a disastrous career stumble--such as drug or booze addiction--has become fodder for the packaging game. Go to the Betty Ford Clinic and come back with a New Image. Tell all--but hold out for that $1.5-million book deal or at least the cover of People magazine.

Sometimes the reinvention game backfires. After spending millions in market research, Coca-Cola unveiled its New Coke, which bombed. Undeterred, the firm shrewdly took its original product, renamed it Classic Coke, hyped it as a nostalgic treasure and sold more soft drinks than ever before.

Unfortunately, today’s media has such a voracious appetite for flashy new sensations that artists rarely have time to develop their craft before they are discarded for the latest Hot Young Prodigy. (Was it that long ago that 20-year-old Bret Easton Ellis was being hailed as the new F. Scott Fitzgerald or Jean-Michel Basquiat as the “black Picasso?”) All too often, the buzzword for artists today is promotion, not posterity. As Tama Janowitz told The Times last year: “I don’t care what people say. I just want them to buy the book.”

Politics as Metaphor

Today’s politics is Tastes Great vs. Less Filling. The most striking zinger of the 1984 presidential primaries--Walter Mondale’s quip, “Where’s the beef?”--was lifted from a Wendy’s ad. This year, Dukakis tried to beef up his debate image by dubbing Bush “the Joe Isuzu of American politics.” Today’s politics offers advertising as ideology. In a major address this spring urging support for his Contra aid package, Ronald Reagan compared Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega to--you guessed it--Joe Isuzu.

“William Howard Taft could never be elected President (now)--he weighed 350 pounds,” said Pacy Markham, the TV ad wiz who created Miller’s Lite Beer campaign and worked on DianneFeinstein’s first San Francisco mayoral campaign. “Today’s political campaigns are all marketing. Everything you see is raw footage for a commercial. At least with a TV commercial, you’re ultimately selling the product. But with the presidency, you’re not selling a politician, you’re selling something once removed--the image of a politician.”

That’s why presidential debates--even as controlled as they are--prompt such intense media scrutiny. They represent a rare glimpse at the product--not the ad image. Even the national conventions, which were once delightfully raucous, unrehearsed melees, have been reduced to made-for-TV political movies--sanitized, synchronized and scheduled like clockwork for prime-time viewing. According to Adweek analyst Barbara Lippert, presidential candidates now routinely test-market their speeches and debate rejoinders before recruited focus groups, as if they were researching a new ad campaign for a luxury car or a summer action movie.

It’s no wonder Dukakis’ anti-Bush packaging commercials, which featured images of cozy male camaraderie and barroom-haze visuals, look like Nissan ads. “They’re supposed to,” says Markham. “That’s what made the Reagan commercials so great. They were the first ones which didn’t immediately announce that they were political ads. It was brilliant--they kept you in an emotionally susceptible consumer mood. I once screened the ‘Morning in America’ ads, but replaced the voice-over with an old Coca-Cola ad sound track. And it played perfectly! And what was so hilarious was when the image ‘Vote for Reagan’ came up on screen, the Coke commercial sound track had a chorus singing, ‘Have a Nice Day.’ ”

Star Power

At their best, the image-making artifacts of our era have an undeniable aesthetic shimmer. You see far more inventive editing and dynamic visuals in music videos and sneaker ads (particularly Reebok’s “Let U B U” and Nike’s “Revolution” campaigns) than in most big-budget Hollywood films. It’s no wonder many critics prefer Adrian Lyne’s Diet Coke commercials to his hit movies.

However, sometimes the package simply overpowers the product. Eric Clapton re-recorded his old hit, “After Midnight,” as a Michelob commercial--and watched the song become a rock-radio staple again. (Unfortunately, he had to watch from a distance. Much to Michelob’s dismay, Clapton was in a detox clinic, drying out from alcoholism by the time the commercial aired.)

Theater impresario Cameron Mackintosh says that by 1990 “Les Miserables” productions will be in 26 cities, including licensed productions in Tampa, Tel Aviv, Reykjavik, East Berlin and Buenos Aires. Noting the show’s propensity for mass marketing, a Washington Post writer dubbed the production “McMiz,” adding: “Maybe they should post a lighted sign over the Kennedy Center: OVER 70 MILLION SERVED.”

Calling it “quality control,” the producers have even made videotapes of makeup-application procedures so actors in each far-flung company will have a standardized look. Given such an obsessive, fast-food-style homogenization, it’s no surprise that many reviewers blasted the production for having the air of mechanized, rubber-stamp theater.

However, when it comes to canny packaging, the classic example remains “Dirty Dancing.” The low-budget film’s coming-of-age drama struck such a responsive chord that it earned Vestron Pictures a heady $100 million at the box office--and emerged as one of this year’s biggest home-video rental hits. Streaking into the mega-hit stratosphere, “Dirty” ceased being a movie--it entered the exalted realm of Marketing Bonanza.

The film’s RCA Records sound track sold more than 3 million copies. Now there’s a network TV series knock-off, several feature film imitations--college frats even have ‘Dirty Dancing’ beer blasts. Not about to wait years for Vestron to make a movie sequel, RCA rushed out its own sound-track sequel, “More Dirty Dancing,” which also cracked the Top 5 of the charts. This was quickly followed by “Dirty Dancing: The Concert Tour,” which reprised hits from the movie and featured an anonymous crowd of Dirty Dancers, performing production numbers evoking key moments from the film.

Of course the film’s stars, Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze, were nowhere to be found. But the ersatz quality of the event didn’t discourage most fans, who seemed happy to bask in the reflected glory of the event. Perhaps that’s why marketing has become such an art today. In an era where image is indistinguishable from reality, an attractive package can stimulate just as much satisfaction--and supply twice the promotional punch--as the real thing.