The Smiling Carcass- An Opera on Advertising, Saturday, April 17 1999. In the Marbles Hall of the 'Nümberger Akademie', Oliviero Toscani, the Benetton advertising campaign photographer, is having a heated public conversation with Jean-Christophe Ammann, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, and Edi Andrist, 'Vice Chairman and Executive Creative Director' of the big advertising company McCann-Erickson. The event has been organized by McCann-Erickson in co-operation with the Pocket Opera Company of Nuremberg. Various television cameras and radio journalists and reporters are following the event. The most unusual aspect is probably the fact that the audience is actually watching a scene from an Opera. This conversation is, so to speak, the Overture of the first ever showing of 'The Smiling Carcass - the opera', the new theatrical production in music by Pocket Opera on advertising. A good part of the script is taken from Oliviero Toscani's book 'La Pub est une charogne qui nous sourit', published in France and then translated into various languages all over the world. The music is by Andrea Molino, Peter Beat Wyrsch directs it and the script was assembled and edited by Berthold Scheider.