I made the six-part series The Art of Persuasion for Channel 4 in its early days – about the changing relationship between art and advertising, and by extension between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture – for two main reasons. One was that I’d recently re-read and still been mightily impressed by cultural theorist Walter Benjamin’s essay written in the mid-1930s called The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which argued that our relationship with original works of art changes utterly once we have seen reproductions of them. In Benjamin’s case, this meant reproductions by print technologies. So when we go and see the Mona Lisa the experience is filtered through the painting’s many uses in other contexts – and we tend to concentrate on the close-up zone rather than ‘the big picture’. The other reason was that from my experience of teaching in art schools and especially at the Royal College of Art, where I’d been Professor of Cultural History since 1979, it seemed to me that the fixed categories of the post-war period – fine art, applied art, design, communications – were beginning to blur at the edges with interesting results along various two-way streets. Yet these fixed categories remained at the heart of art education, as they had done for as long as anyone could remember.

For example, Daniel Weil – then a postgraduate student designer – exhibited in his final show of 1981 a series of mini radio speakers and a circuit board encased in polythene bags on metal hangers inside a large see-through tent and he called the piece Homage to Duchamp. Weil was an industrial designer and at the time no one on the staff knew how to react to his exhibition. Was it design? Was it art? Was it an installation? Did it matter? At the same time, some painters were turning towards installation and video work as well – and, in the post-Pop Art era, had fewer and fewer problems with the imagery and technologies of popular culture.