“But to define the poster as being, unlike ‘fine’ art forms, primarily concerned with advocacy – and the poster artist as someone who, like a whore, works for money and tries to please a client — is dubious, simplistic. (It is also unhistorical. Only since the early nineteenth century has the artist been generally understood as working to express himself, or for the sake of ‘art.’) What makes posters, like book jackets and magazine covers, an applied art is not that they are single-mindedly devoted to ‘communication’ or that the people who do them are more regularly or better paid than most painters or sculptors. Posters are an applied art because, typically, they apply what has already been done in the other arts.”
— Susan Sontag (via Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political Artifact, Commodity)