The Deceptive Headline

The title of yesterday's blog post by Jan Herman on The Huffington Post reads "Milton Glaser Loves Information, Not Persuasion." Fortunately, he began by reminding us that we were familiar with Glaser's work, if not his name:

The 79-year-old graphic designer perhaps most famous for creating the I♥NY logo had a dose of surprising advice last week for the propagandists among us -- the marketers, advertisers, public-relations spinners and, yes, journalists -- along with citizens at large facing an onslaught of political campaigns.

It is "essential for us all to question all the beliefs we cherish," Milton Glaser said in his keynote speech to a daylong 'ganda bash, "Where the Truth Lies," organized by the School of Visual Arts with The Graduate Center, CUNY. "Beliefs must be held lightly because certainty can be the enemy of truth."

Unfortunately, Herman's zealous desire to bash propagandists led him down the path of sloppy reporting, best represented by his choice of title, which turns out to be a misreading of Glaser's citation of Horace. The text Glaser cited was the aphorism, "The purpose of art is to inform and delight," which he then qualified by observing, "Horace did not say persuade and delight." Herman then tried to map this into twentieth-century rhetoric, thereby instituting as much distortion as any good propagandist would.

This is one of those cases where distinguishing between nouns and verbs is no mere matter of grammatical nit-picking. Horace chose to describe the purpose of art with verbs because his focus was on artistic practice, rather than artistic products; and, to make the situation even more complicated, it is unclear that the Latin language recognized "information" as a "product of informing." Indeed, my cheap paperback Latin dictionary reveals that the Latin word for "information" is informatio (which also happens to be the noun for "idea"), while the Latin for the verb "inform" is instruěre, as in "to teach." In other words the purpose of art is to teach and delight, which is pretty much the way Aristotle had put it in his "Poetics." Herman has basically deep-ended on current practices of warping the concept of "information" beyond any useful recognition, thus bashing those propagandists with a red herring.

All this just goes to show that Herman seems to have missed the entire point of Glaser's lecture. Glaser used a belief that he cherished as his focal point, and Herman then embraced and cherished his own corrupted reading of Glaser's text without ever thinking to question the position he just took. In other words he put a "spin" on his experience in order to use his blog post to flog the propagandists, not realizing that, in so doing, he was placing himself in the midst of their camp. Like most propagandists, he assumed that his text would never be read at more than a casual level; but we know better, don't we?