Here's our old friend, the Great Ideas of Western Man
series. I hadn't come across it since it used to run in the
magazines. At the top of the page you'd see a quotation-
such as:

"Hitch your wagon to a star."

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

And under it would be a painting of a cubistic horse strangling
on a banana. I often wondered if the artists were given
explicit instructions never to let the artwork have anything
to do with the quotation, because they never did. If this
was actually a policy, it was a brilliant stroke; because the
ads were supposed to have nothing whatsoever to do with
what the company actually did. I used to think the
company was called the Transcendental Can Corporation,
but I see by this entry that I was mistaken about that. Like
all institutional ads, the ads in this series convey the
message: "We really don't do what we really do (e.g., make
tin cans). What we manufacture is dignity."

-Tom WoIfe