Advertising and Promotion Management Commons^™

Crossing The Great Divides: Selfridges, Modernity, And The Commodified Authentic, Elizabeth Outka

English Faculty Publications

This article takes these critiques as a given. Incisive critical commentary on advertising and on marketing abounds, and exploring the false claims and schemes within a commercial culture is an essential and ongoing project. This critical approach, however, is not the end of the story, for armed only with skepticism, we are blinded to the dramatic commercial revolution offered by Selfridges, one that is intrinsically tied to British modernism. Selfridges embodies and deploys a surprisingly modernist set of tensions between low and high culture, and between the specter of the mass market and an alternative, non-commercial aesthetic. As this article …