"Nearly all American culture is commercial. It is either market-driven, as in the case of popular music, paperback fiction, and movies; or it is advertising-driven, as in the case of radio television, newspapers and magazines. And this culture is, of course, only an aspect of the American way of life generally, in which virtually every good – food, housing, furniture, clothing, cars, shaving creams – is understood to be designed to extract the greatest possible profit from the market conditions available, and to be susceptible to alteration the instant those conditions change. Because it is the chief tool for making conditions change, thereby creating new areas of demand and new sources of profit, advertising has become for most people the symbol of the thoroughgoing commercialism of American life.
"Everyone participates in this system, and partakes of its benefits (individual economic opportunity and national economic expansion) and puts up with its drawbacks (cheap goods, an often banal and sometimes exploitative popular culture, financial uncertainty). The group that has benefited the most from this way of life, and that has done the most to shape it and keep the system producing more of it, is the group of upper-middle-class professionals – lawyers, bankers, stockbrokers, designers, advertising executives, editors, publishers, business executives, television producers, and the college professors who educated them. These people were made possible – were made necessary, in fact – by the spectacularly successful commercialization of American life in the twentieth century; for they supply its creative and analytic intelligence. They are the society's most highly prized and rewarded members. But until recently, this group always demonstrated one peculiarity. Its tastes, its values, its lifestyle were all anti-commercial. The Wall Street banker lived like a member of the English gentry in a mock Tudor mansion in Mount Kisco. The Madison Avenue adman had a place in Vermont with outdoor plumbing and no electricity. The television producer bought his filet at an old-fashioned butcher, where it was wrapped in old-fashioned butcher paper. The publisher of a magazine for teenage girls watched public television – or had a passion for Mozart, or Trollope, or vintage wines. He vacationed in the cathedral towns of France. He didn't like motorboats, or billboards, or big American cars. And so forth. His face was turned away from the culture that gave him his living."
--Louis Menand, from “A Friend Writes: The Old New Yorker,” circa 2002
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