In his Modernist Journals Project article “BLAST: An Introduction,” Mark Morrison writes of the influence of promotional culture on both the form and intellectual methods of the modernist magazine Blast. By the time the first issue was published in 1914, there had been a union of new printing technology and mass advertising methods. The circulation of popular magazines, such as Collier’s and Scribner’s, boomed because the publishers were able to sell at less than cost, profiting by the sale of advertising. A low cost allowed a larger readership, which generated a larger consumer base for print ads.

The creators of Blast absorbed the promotional methods of the day to propagate their message. Morrison writes of Blast’s use of attention-grabbing “shock tactics” such as exaggerated font sizes and antagonistic language (the cover being the most obvious and immediate example), which connects the magazine to the methods contemporary advertising-posters. They even recognized, in 1915, that the war itself could have “promotional value,” and Wadsworth encouraged Lewis to give the second issue its title, “The War Number.”         

In Blast, we see the melding of art with this new promotional culture. While artists have always had to promote themselves to some extent in order to make a living off their art, the promotion of Blast seems more politically and egoistically motivated than economic­, although Morrison does mention that Lewis and his companions hoped for a wide readership and, presumably, for the economic success this would bring in addition to the artistic. There is an almost evangelistic urgency in the magazine’s message of Vorticism—a desire for a cleansing violence against Victorian mores and aesthetics, so that even new forms still rooted in the old—such as, in Lewis’s view, Italian Futurism—must be rejected.