Capitalism's bizarre appropriations

We're all used to - and I'm still infuriated by - adverts buying up music by bands I like, especially when the band has lost control of their work. But it's the way of the world. Capitalism refreshes itself by appropriating the energy and attitude of youth and other cultures, killing them in the process.

Now, Alex Ross points out that a certain manufacturer of very expensive jeans which aren't intrinsically better than any other brand, has incorporated Charles Ives and Walt Whitman into an ad. Ives was a brilliant modernist composer, though he never let during his successful career as an insurance executive, and Whitman was the demonstratively homosexual bard of 19th-century American expansionism. It's always possible that the company thought it was buying the music of Owen Pallett, who's mixed Ives into his own piece, but it's weird, nonetheless, and culturally insensitive. Does it cheapen the music, or bring the ad to the level of art?