M(ART)KETING: A British and American Strategy

Aniello Vallefuoco

M A R K E T I N G

A British and American Strategy

Aniello Vallefuoco M(ART)KETING: A British and American Strategy

Marketing & Cultural Studies

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

- John Donne

CONTENTS

01

Introduction

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2.1 Study Case Jason Seife for Nike Footwear

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2.2 Study Case Jeff Koons for H&M

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CHAPTER 1

Art Spaces/ Commercial Spaces

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CHAPTER 3

The Artist as Entrepreneur

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1.1 Study Case

Elmgreen & Dragset

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3.1 Study Case

Marina Abramovic and the MAI Institute

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1.2 Barnds’ Art Foundations

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3.2 Visual Arts and the Music Market

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CHAPTER 2 Art Objects/ Commercial Objects

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3.3 Colour as the Artist’s Sign

STATEMENT Art has never been completely independent from commercial considerations because most of it is meant to be sold, collected, exhibited, or in any other way circulated on some sort of market.

The following analysis intends to underline the recent trend of hybridization between art and business, a tendency that started spreading since the second half of the 19th century in the United States.

Untitled, Clifford Still

Since the second half of the 19th century, art had been funneling through an aesthetic process about its communicative content: while a work of fine art had once a more or less defined form such as a painted canvas or a bronze sculpture, detectable content, a peculiar context of presentation, these categories became subject to subversion over the next half-century.

Three particularly strong examples of this extension of the boundaries of art can be observed in the major movements of postwar American art: Minimalism, Conceptualism and Pop Art. With the influx of European refugees and èmigrès around World War II, New York became what Paris had been: the centre of the Western art world.

In fact, it is during these years that the United States (particularly New York and California) also gained relevance as the new international hub of the art world. Moreover, the emerging American art market achieved worldwide importance and since Minimalism, Conceptualism and Pop Art subverted the categories of art, this led to an opening of art towards what had formerly been its supposed other: the commercial market.

The avantgardist strategies led to a blurring of the line between art and commerce. All this occurs in the context of contemporary commercial culture, a culture that has become increasingly aestheticized.

This aestheticization can be understood as a consequence of the capitalist necessity to constantly increase consumers’ demand for goods.

Yet, this intrusion of instrumental reason into art has developed towards the curatorial practice of various museums of modern art since the late 1990s, which brought in particular luxury products

INTR ODUC TION

01

into the art museum. Examples include the Armani exhibition (2000) or the BMW Art of the Motorcycle exhibition (1998), both at the Guggenheim Museum of New York, as well as such exhibitions as Takashi Murakami’s, in which handbags designed by Murakami for Louis Vuitton were both exhibited and sold at the MOCA and the Brooklyn Museum.

At the same time, the art market became a fundamental force in the art world: art has become a preferred object of financial investment. In this connection, it’s important to notice that art prices are not just economic indicators of current or projected financial values; prices have also acquired significant symbolic meanings, indicating artistic value, the status of the artist in the art world and sometimes even the artist’s self-esteem, as a new figure of the

Death of an image, Andrea Galvani

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Fountain (1917), Marcel Duchamp

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artist’s persona started to form. Moreover, the art market has not lost its importance after the 2007 recession in the United States: sales are increasing again, with the sales of contemporary art works tripling between 2001 and 2011.

If we were to go in search of a foundational moment of these major destabilizations between art and commerce, it would likely be Marcel Duchamp’s invention of the found object, most famously manifested itself in Duchamp’s decision to place a urinal in an art exhibition. The American art movements of the 1950s, ‘60s and early ‘70s introduced an avantgardist dynamic that has undermined the categories of art in unique ways.

They effectively opened up the concept and institutional framework of art to the commercial logic of the capitalist culture in which it is embedded today.

Also, the strategies employed by Pop Art, and most prominently by Andy Warhol, brought the artist out of the Bohemian corner and positioned him or her at the very centre of consumer culture. In what has today come to be known as the creative economy, we can even claim that the artist/entrepreneur is positioned as an economic role model.

What is taking place is not just an opening of art to the logic of the market and the increasing valuation of the aesthetic in the realm of the commercial. More than that, it appears that we can observe a reversal of roles between artist and entrepreneur, the art space and the commercial space and, last but not least, the art object and the brand product. In fact, the market success of contemporary artists like Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Olafur Eliasson seems to prove that it is precisely this entrepreneurial approach that is an expression of and a factor in the cultural and social legitimation of art.

The convergence between contemporary art and contemporary commercial strategies can be so observed on many levels: this analysis will focus on the convergence of art and marketing in contemporary culture considering the approach between artwork and object of consumption, the hybridization between art spaces and commercial spaces and of course the new image of the artist as an entrepreneur.

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ART SPACES / COMMERCIAL SPACES Chapter I

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Space is a key dimension both for commerce and art: it is widely used for the purpose of presenting art and consumer goods in a way to attract the observer. Despite their obvious difference in function, there are several crucial similarities between spaces in which goods are sold and spaces in which art is exhibited.

This close relationship is anchored in a shared historical moment. Both presentational spaces developed in the late 19th century and reached their apex around the turn of the century. Both were modern capitalist institutions created for visual pleasure: department stores as well as museums and galleries displayed items for aesthetic, educational and commercial purposes, even if with different emphases.

Moreover, the influence between the two spaces functions both ways. The closeness of museums and department stores manifested itself strongly in the late 19th- and early 20th-century United States, where, as William Leach pointed out, significant museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of 07

Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Newark Museum cooperated closely with department stores. Such cooperation was driven both by the motivation “of spreading the idea of beauty to the masses” and by the conviction that if museums wanted influence, they had to take the commercial route.

Just as much as art was exhibited in department stores, consumer objects were showcased in art museums. Of all places, it was the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York that most strongly developed this relationship, bringing it to a highpoint with their popular and well-received “Good Design exhibition series” (1950 to 1955).

These exhibitions, organized by the MoMA in cooperation with the wholesale merchandising centre called the “Chicago Merchandise Mart”, displayed household items that had been chosen by MoMA’s curatorial staff for their modernist aesthetic, with the purpose of showing the ordinary as object of desire.

The exhibitions were supported and advertised by retail stores, which in

turn used the “Good Design” label to advertise their products. The “Good Design Exhibitions” were not the first ones of their kind; they were in fact successors to the earlier “Useful Objects exhibition”, which had focused on lower priced objects. Those exhibitions, mounted both at the MoMA and in department stores all over the country, showed the initially close interaction between modern art and commerce in the United States. In recent years, museums have again moved visibly closer to the commercial realm, particularly through the institutional interaction with established brands and companies. The Guggenheim Museum under its former director Thomas Krens spearheaded this development with the “Art of the Motorcycle” (1998) or “Armani” (2000), exhibitions which show that the convergence of art and commerce in museums remains highly controversial today. Just consider White Cube: built on a minimalist design aesthetic, it is the largest of all the gallery’s sites and is situated in London. It was called

by Michel Foucault a “heteropic”

space, able to host any kind of object, including luxury commodities. Minimalism was born on the West Coast in post-World War II. Artists of this movement actually produced their works relying on industrial methods to reach “transparency”, meaning simplicity.

Moreover, artists like Donald Judd, one of the first Minimalism exponents, produced both furniture and artworks underlining an even more blurred boundary.

The Seven Heavenly Places, Anselm Kiefer

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09

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Due to express objectivity, minimalism well fit for both exhibition art spaces and commercial spaces, becoming the style of choice for many fashion and luxury boutiques since the 1990s. In particular, we can find this choice in flagship stores, such as LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy), fashion brands Givenchy, Kenzo, Marc Jacobs, Emilio Pucci, Donna Karen, and Helmut Lang: these retail outlets are designed to express exclusivity, specificity and individualism.

The spatial design is a chief instrument in achieving this effect and the use of exhibition strategies established in the art context is particularly popular here: boutiques act as art spaces and art spaces as boutiques.

Another noteworthy example is the New York flagship store of fashion designer Helmut Lang, opened at 80 Greene Street in SoHo in 1998.

The architect Richard Gluckman designed it as a white cube and included an installation by the artist Jenny Holzer, so that already when seen 11

from the street it is confusing whether you are looking at a shop or a gallery.

In fact it’s not possible to see any of the clothes stored inside because of these installations, which strongly obscure the commercial nature of the space. The Helmut Lang boutiques are very much in accord with the identity of their fashion brand, known for its minimalistc style.

Before he designed for fashion brand, the architect Richard Gluckman had been well known for his 1987 design of the SoHo Dia Art Foundation, as much as many art galleries and museums such as the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. John Pawson too designed art spaces before the Calvin Klein store: architects well known for their art spaces created commercial spaces in the spirit of art spaces.

We can observe the close linking of art spaces and retail spaces also on a large scale: the Crystal Shopping Center

in Las Vegas by Daniel Libeskind and the Rockwell Group is a shopping mall built in the spirit of a museum, showing the strong style of its creator and figuring an important image to the public, such as brands try to do.

So we can actually say that it is a twoway path: both art and commercial spaces are converging in an endless game of redefining each other’s limits.

1. My Clothes, Jenny Holzer 2. Outrospection, Daniel Ramos Obregòn 3. Untitled, Donald Judd

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1.2 STUDY CASE Elmgreen & Dragset

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The duo of artists Elmgreen and Dragset are well known in the marketing panorama for their collaboration with many brand foundations for the production of fancy installations that also work as advertisement due to their huge visual impact.

Looking at the Prada Marfa installation, for instance, we can hardly tell what we are looking at: a commercial space or a space devoted primarily to disinterested aesthetic experience? Prada Marfa is a little pavilion on Highway 90 in West Texas, about 40 miles from Marfa, Texas. The pavilion appears to be a Prada boutique. It was produced by the local nonprofit art organization Ballroom Marfa and by the New York-based Art Production Fund. The small building looks just like a typical Prada store, including display of the 2005 season’s handbags and high heels. The major difference is that this boutique is not a space where commerce did or ever will take place. Although it is a non-commercial artwork, the installation effectively functions as a marketing tool for the Prada brand, working as a flagship building.

We can conclude that the installation combines artistic and commercial interests: the art experience and the brand experience are inextricably intertwined primarily through the use of the Prada name, logo and products. As the art critic Kwon maintains, the art object becomes utterly unstable . Although Prada Marfa seems to be situated in the middle of nowhere, it effectively anchors the global, free-floating imaginary discourse of brand marketing to a locally and temporally determined environment, arresting it right there, in West Texas in 2005.

Moreover, in support of the art project, Elmgreen & Dragset developed a fine art edition of a sign that says “Pada Marfa/ 1837 MI”, marking the distance from New York, the American capital of art, to Marfa. They can be bought for 300$ on the online shop operated by the Art Production Fund, the non-profit organization that sponsored Prada Marfa: it is the website’s stated goal to bring art to a broader audience as well as to generate additional funds for supporting art projects. As you can see, Prada Marfa looks like a gallery and a boutique at the same time, not least because galleries and boutiques have come to look alike.

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Tree, Line Zander Olsen

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1.2 Brands’ Art Foundations

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Often art has been used by fashion industry as a marketing means. Arguably for the same reason, in the last three decades Western Europe fashion brands are establishing a consistently increasing number of private art foundations.

ers, to a desire to link their brands with cultural capital or creative heritage.

Examples of this phenomenon include the following:

Studies have reported that fashion brands proximity with the arts enables the brands to be perceived as more luxurious in order to reach a wider and more specific audience for selling their products.

• Private art foundations: Fondazione CarlaFendi Fondation Cartier Fondation d’Enterprise Hermes Fondazione Ferragamo Fundación Loewe Fondation Louis Vuitton Fondazione Prada Fondazione NicolaTrussardi Fondazione Zegna

Several luxury fashion brands have invested resources in cultural initiatives distinctive from their core commercial activities. In particular, this has led brands to establish organizations (typically identified as a “Foundations”) dedicated to collecting and commissioning contemporary art by established and emerging artists.

The suggested motives for these activities range from the personal interest of the brands owners and manag19

• Art and cultural projects: Fendi for Fountains Fendi for EUR Gucci Museo Museo Ferragamo Tod’s for the Colosseum

Most brands are claiming that their projects are “dedicated to promoting and rising awareness of Contemporary Art” (Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain n.d.), or are “contributing to the preservation of cultural heritage and values from the past, and to guarantee their continuity and future growth, primarily in the art” (Fondazione Carla Fendi n.d.), and brands are claiming to “supporting contemporary artistic creation and making it accessible to as many people as possible” (LVMH 2014).

Most fashion private foundations are promoting contemporary art in three different ways: owning a private collection, commissioning artistic works, and organizing special exhibitions in collaboration with institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the London National Gallery (Fondation Louis Vuitton 2015a, Fondation Louis Vuitton 2015b, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi 2010b, Fondazione Prada 2015c). A different example of collaboration is brand’s artist sponsorship, such as Yayoi Kusama’s

exhibition in 2012 at London Tate Modern, which was completely sponsored by Louis Vuitton foundation (Akt II 2012). Finally, there are brands that are investing in artistic expressions different from fine art. Gucci, Prada, Carla Fendi and Alda Fendi are investing in cinema (Fondazione Alda Fendi n.d.); Louis Vuitton and Cartier in music (Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain n.d.); Carla Fendi, Alda Fendi and Louis Vuitton are investing also in theatre; Loewe foundation invests in poetry, photography and design (Loewe n.d.).

The majority of the cultural initiatives so far analyzed have shown a strong relationship with the partner brands’ hometowns.

A famous example is Maurizio Cattelan’s exhibition “Psychological Lab in Real Life” (2004), hosted in a Milan’s square and sponsored by Trussardi: it was a shocking installation of three children hanging by their necks from an ancient oak tree. Other examples of an existing relationship between brands and cities are: Fendi project of Fontana di Trevi refurbishment (Fendi 2013), EUR building renew20

al in 2015 to host Fendi headquarter (Ahmad 2014), and Tod’s investment in refurbishing the Colosseum.

Without doubt, brands have developed undeniable relationships with all these cities and municipalities to be able to organize such events. It is also true that by investing a significant amount of money in such places these brands are granted privileged access to important historical sites, as Fendi’s 90 years anniversary fashion show at Fontana di Trevi has demonstrated (Sinclair Scott 2016).

It is possible to define Prada, Cartier and Louis Vuitton initiatives as similarly structured: they own a private collection and give public access to it; they are commissioning art works by both established and emerging artists; and they are organizing special exhibitions in collaboration with important institutions or private collectors. Moreover, these foundations are also dedicating specific venues to make their foundations accessible. Arguably, this makes these foundations even more similar to museums and for this reason 21

an interesting intersection between luxury fashion brand and public engagement, between exclusivity and inclusivity.

By definition, a luxury fashion brand is a brand that, using marketing and communication strategies based on storytelling and brand heritage, is able to evoke the idea of exclusivity, high quality, craftsmanship and a distinctive brand image in customers’ mind, even when these elements are subjective. Some luxury fashion brands are shifting their effort from fashion production to art investments, as fashion brands proximity with the arts enables the brands to be perceived as more luxurious. From this perspective, the main assumption is that the opening of private art foundations by luxury fashion brands is a new way to generate a higher level of associated luxury, by associating seminal works of art with a fashion brand image and identity. It is in this context that brands are also enhancing their marketing strategies with public engagement strategies in contemporary art.

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Anatomy of an Angel, Damien Hirst

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ART OBJECTS

Chapter II 25

COMMERCIAL OBJECTS

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An important contribution for this topic was given by the Frankfurt School.

Its critical theory was raised by philosophers such as Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt and Marx Horkheimer during the second decade of the 20th century in order to develop the Marxist’s philosophy according to the new Capitalism. In 1933 the School was forced to close due to Nazis army and decided to move to the United States, where it found hospitality at Columbia University, New York, already a centre of the new flourishing avantgardist approach to the arts.

time. As a rule, use takes place after sale. This leads to the following circle: the realization of use value is the presupposition of the act of purchase, and the act of purchase is the presupposition of the realization of use value.

But where is the exit from this circle?

Ordinary language offers an answer: the buyer buys a specific commodity, since he promises himself to obtain from it the use value he desires. What sets the purchase in motion is the use value promise. But on which ground should I promise myself that others will meet my needs?

The main subject of these theories is the focus on “commodity aesthetics”, Using the Marxist analysis as his point of departure, W.F. Haug claims that any commodity is destined for sale, which is the value that must be realized. What moves the buyer to exchange money for the commodity is the use value. But the use value must be realized too, and it is, as Marx says, “only realized in use or consumption”.

However, purchase and use are normally separated in both space and

The answer seems obvious: what makes me expect use value are the aspects offered by the commodity. The capitalist means to encourage buyers to consumption, seeking to give the commodity new charms and to persuade consumers of new needs.

Consumerism, which Adorno locates entirely in the process of late capitalism, where he sees needs as being “totally controlled”, seems for Arendt to lie in human nature, since the necessary detour via the analysis of me-

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diations is sacrificed to an anthropological short-circuit. The analytics of commodity aesthetics has to discover these mediations.

As the bearer of use-value promise, aesthetic abstraction lies at the base of many techniques relevant to sales.

Among them: the shaping of the body of the commodity, the particular elaboration of its ‘skin’, its representation on the package, its decoration in display, its mise-en-scène in TV commercials, paths that actually the realization of artworks shares too. In this new scenario, intellectual rights have come to be of central importance as the capital of the creative economy and creativity has come to occupy a core function in this economy. Copyright laws for such combinations of aesthetic form and linguistic signs were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

These laws founded the property rights of words and shapes. Apart from the “self promoting” attires of the particular material configuration of the body of the commodity, the specification is easier to grasp in the combination of

figurative appearances and semiotic designation, which distinguishes the aesthetic as an appeal to meaning and sensuousness.

The aesthetic monopoly granted from these laws brings the art object and the brand object in an even stronger relationship, which makes, one more time, hard to define boundaries between the two categories.

Going back to Marx, he maintains that the exchange value has gained new importance, over the use value.

It also generates the alienation of the producer from the product as well as of the consumer from the conditions of production. This phenomenon applies both for goods and artworks as we can see for instance with Warhol’s Factory. Moreover, while the Frankfurt School emphasized that true art is and has to be external to and independent from an instrumental, capitalist market logic, more sociological approaches as those put forth by Simmel, Veblen, Barthes and Bourdieu emphasize that art too has a very real value for those who consume it, primarily in symbolic and social terms.

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These arguments follow the proposition that commodities are valuable to the consumer not merely because of their exchange value or because of their artificially created fetish character, as Marx assumed, but because they carry out important social and symbolic functions, for instance by helping consumers build and exhibit social standing and cultural capital.

As Adorno and Horkheimer observe, exchange value is becoming the defining feature of art in society. This exchange value is based on social prestige: art becomes fetishized as a marker of social status and recognition. All of these concepts share an emphasis on the intrusion or presence of market logic in the ideally self-evaluating, autonomous realm of art.

The above-mentioned philosophers are thus in essence criticizing the very phenomenon we are discussing here, namely the blurring of art and marketing. For them, while art is becoming a commodity fetish, advertising is becoming something like art. Even more generally, culture becomes a com29

modity and commodities are turned into culture. Accordingly, if we look at the fundamental importance commodities have gained, and at the way the production, framing, and consumption of commodities is shaping contemporary culture, it is hard to disagree with the Frankfurt School’s view that of contemporary culture of many societies in Europe, the United States and beyond is a capitalist consumer culture in which aestheticization and commercialization are fundamentally related.

What explains the aestheticization of commodities is the pleasure in what is new and the demand for conspicuousness or a craving for distinction. Obviously from the standpoint of the producer, the production of distinction is by intent the production of conformism. For those consumers who want distinction, every such conformism motivates anew the desire for a distinctive escape from mass conformity.

This process constantly remodels the needs addressed by commodity aesthetics. The offers are not simple an-

swers to needs, but rather reformulate the latter’s demand. Every demand is ‘understood’ as a market demand and related to something purchasable and it’s in this perspective that the new figure of the artist produces artworks, creating them under a market-oriented approach, most likely as an entrepreneur.

Starting with the body of the commodity, concentrating on its surface, transfigured on the packaging and situated in display and decoration, commodity aesthetics turns art into objects and again, the border between cultural industry and everyday life is transcended in both directions.

The resulting real-imaginary merger has been described as “promotional culture” by Wernick . If morality and aesthetics explain our “tastes and sentiments” as David Hume claimed (Treatise of Human Nature), then commodity aesthetics with its ‘technology of the beautiful’ does this even more.

And if Hume claims that the effect of every kind of beauty causes “a peculiar delight and satisfaction, as defor-

mity produces pain”, no matter “upon whatever subject it may be placed”, then it becomes clear that commodity aesthetics does just this, namely, it both depicts “delight and satisfaction” via the emanation of commodity beauty, and also serves to excite them.

Above all, it ties the anticipatory appearance and promise of “delight and satisfaction” to the commodity.

Without any doubt, what Hegel claims about the work of art holds true for commodity aesthetics as well, namely, that “the beautiful object, in its own existence, makes its own concept appear as realized and displays in itself subjective unity and liveliness” . To say that the beautiful commodity in its aesthetic existence makes the concept of its use value appear as realized and display in itself subjective unity and liveliness, is to describe a typical TV commercial in which a scene of a happy life is unfolded around whatever is advertised. Not only artistic beauty, but also that of the commodity “is the idea as immediate unity of the concept with its reality, the idea, 30

however, only insofar as this unity is present immediately in sensuous and real appearance�: it is the real imaginary of the ‘good life’ of commodity consumption.

As Engels stated, commodity aesthetics stands in a parasitical relation to all art as well as to all symbolic forms in general and to all ideological powers.

In a certain sense, commodity aesthetics becomes an aesthetic parody of what art for its sake represents.

Since this new trend, commodities are no longer presented in their use value, but as elements of a life style: in the context of this way of using them the aesthetics of the commodities has become important, no longer as use value, but in the context of being used; no longer aesthetic use-value promise, but the aesthetics of commodities being staged in the context of some lifestyle use, such as artworks mainly do.

A fitting example of these dynamic is the 2007 sculpture For the Love of God by Damien Hirst: a platinum 31

Yayoi Kusama

skull, with its original teeth, set with diamonds.

The title originates from exclamations Hirst’s mother would make on hearing plans for new works when he was starting out as an artist. As he explains: “She used to say, ‘For the love of God, what are you going to do next!’”.

The sculpture is famous for being one of the most expensive artworks so far, offered for sale for £14m. For the Love of God acts as a reminder that our existence on earth is transient. Hirst combined the imagery of classic memento mori with inspiration drawn from Aztec skulls and the Mexican love of decoration and attitude towards death.

As he explains: “You don’t like it [death], so you disguise it or you decorate it to make it look like something bearable”.

In this regard, the pioneer movement that brought aesthetic commodities into art was Pop Art, which changed the subject matter of art to represent images and objects of everyday life in America.

This included objects meant for purchasing and consumption such as the fast food Claes Oldenburg often depicted or the detergent boxes and soup cans Andy Warhol used for his series. Pop imagery often also resembled comic books, such as in Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings, or advertisements, as in Robert Indiana’s or James Rosenquist’s works, and even more strongly so in Tom Wesselman’s collages, which included actual printed advertisements of much-bought American consumer brands.

This use of widely, commercially circulated images and objects was accompanied by specific techniques and materials of production. Most artists created their works with the help of methods that allowed for serial production, which by the way eliminated the artist’s touch.

The most important of these techniques was silk-screening, most famously used by Andy Warhol in his serial paintings.

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For The Love of God D A M I E N H I R S T 33

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2.1

STUDY CASE: Jason Seife for Nike Footwear

As Jason Seife himself explained on his Twitter account, “It’s not every day that you get commissioned by Nike Basketball to create a work inspired by one of the greatest athletes of our generation Kobe Bryant.

the same regal colors in a free and non distinct design, representing Kobe’s exciting yet undecided future.

After attending the Kobe AD event in Los Angeles I was very inspired by Kobe’s statements on his career and this next chapter of his life after retirement.

I knew I wanted to break out of my comfort zones and try something new with this piece and involve a sculptural element as I’ve never done before.”

Seife goes on to explain that “The artwork consists of 3 Parts: (Part 1) The basketball itself is used as a metaphor for Kobe’s life as a whole with the missing quadrant representing his now completed basketball career. (Part 2) The missing piece of the ball reveals an intricately painted design in regal colors to represent Kobe’s amazing accomplishments through his career, his attention to detail and excellence in all outlets. (Part 3) The lower half of the ball consists of a fluid version of

The colors flow over the ball in the same way I believe Kobe’s greatness and work ethic will continue to flow into whichever routes he chooses to explore in this next chapter of his life.”

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2.2 STUDY CASE:

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Jeff Koons for H&M

“I want my work to be accessible to people” said the artist Jeff Koons.

Mothers and daughters, college students and young professionals, he predicted, would be among those to pounce on his contribution to the retailer’s inventory: a $49.50 handbag with a six-inch reproduction of his monumental balloon dog. (The $58.4 million original is on view in a survey of the artist’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art). That limited-edi-

tion bag, already priced from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars (for artist-signed pieces) on eBay, is but the latest in an outpouring of artist/ fashion collaborations to have filtered into the marketplace. In recent times, these have included such high-profile partnerships as Takashi Murakami with Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton; Raf Simons and Sterling Ruby at Dior; and Riccardo Tisci and Marina Abramovic at Givenchy.

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THE ARTIST AS ENTREPRENEUR Chapter III

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The process that connects business and arts finds its main approach in a new advertising policy, which the main firms have set up since the last century. Avantgardist art strategies have undermined the boundaries leading the artist’s image through a new path, figuring it more as a promoter: an entrepreneur evoking specific values that represents his/her art/product as well.

Artists clearly have to consider customers and the market in order to sell the works they produce. Moreover, with the development of the post-industrial economy, creativity, originality and innovation have become quintessential conditions for market success.

At the same time, the idea of how an artist acts in the marketplace has changed fundamentally.

It can be said that it all began with Salvador DalĂŹ featuring in tv commercials such as the one for Lanvin Chocolate, or the Alka-Seltzer aspirine as well, and of course the Veterano brandy. What all of these advertising examples have in common is the emerging sense of aesthetization among the benefits obtained thanks to the use of the prod41

uct, a fact that deeply connects the artwork to the product, and the artist to the entrepreneur as well. However, this change more properly took place in the early 1960s, with Pop Art. Today market success may well be the greatest art of the artist, as Warhol suggested. This transformation shows a new artist, once seen as a bohemian outsider and now in an economic role.

Pop artists drew on mass consumer culture rather than on individual experience. They produced their works in a mass consumer product aesthetics, with a market-oriented approach, undermining the importance of the presence of the artist in the work, in favor of the presence of the artist in the marketplace, also becoming individualist in a very American sense of the word, namely, becoming entrepreneurs.

The importance of entrepreneurial qualities in an artist was part of the broader process of Americanization of American art during the 1950s and 1960s, determining the final liberation from European dominance in the art world: the new artworks exhibited themes belonging to the American

way of life and media. This new generation of artists, including Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana and of course Andy Warhol, strongly interacted with the mainstream culture. This opening can be considered a democratization in terms of subject matter and accessibility to a wider audience: the artist is no more seeking for an individual and traditional form of self expression, independently from and, if necessary, in opposition to society. This second version of individualism, the one brought about by Pop Art artists, mostly referred to the economist philosopher Max Weber’s theory of the self-made

man, closer to the American ideology of personal affirmation. The convergence of Pop Art with consumer and commercial culture can be observed particularly on four levels: firstly, on regard to the subjects, imagery and motifs these artworks used; secondly, on regard to their techniques and materials of production; thirdly, on regard to the marketing of Pop Art, and finally in regard to the new image of the artist. The seriality by which Warhol and other Pop Art artists produced their works closely links this new era for art to the marketing approach; as Christin Mamiya notes, the significant point is

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that Pop Art actively entered into the discourse established by consumer culture.

The incisive marketing of Pop Art movement ensured its success and was a catalyst for the commodification of art. In this manner, Pop Art capitalized on the immediacy and recognizability of the imagery of commodity exchange while simultaneously reinforcing that very culture. From the perspective of marketing theory, the use of easily recognizable cultural imagery like popular brands and icons can be considered a variant of what today is called co-branding: the combination of two or more products or brands to achieve increased public attention for and thus success of both. This effect is called image transfer. For instance, by using images such as the one of Liz Taylor as motifs for his silk-screens, Warhol capitalized on the popularity of cultural icons, thus using co-branding with the effect of image transfer.

The new strategy of capitalizing on icons can be explained analyzing Warhol’s background in commercial advertising. Before venturing into fine 43

art, Warhol had been a commercial artist and illustrated advertisements and marketing materials for more than ten years. As Kaprow observes, “the young artists of the early 1960s come from a middle class in terms of education, private life, social life, appearance or values and this makes artists similar to the personnel in other specialized disciplines and industries in America.� In line with this image, they are now also completely and individually responsible for their professional success.

Warhol played a crucial role in changing the image of the artist. He was recognized as a celebrity, tapping into the mechanisms of the star cult that had developed in Hollywood in the early 20th century. This led the artist to cultivate a specific persona, building his image among the society with a specific appearance strategy, fashioning himself as an eccentric star. In this way, he turned his own name into a brand, thus increasing the demand for and value of any product associated with his name: he combined the mecha-

nisms of stardom and branding, using his name and star persona as a brand to sell his own and later other companies’ products. In turning his name into a brand, Warhol ensured that his work could be continued independently from his actual creative or productive participation, much like brands and businesses in fashion and technology where the name of the original founder remains a sign of quality and style, even without his/her ongoing involvement. Warhol himself expressed this new image of the businessman artist, stating, “Business art is the step that comes after art. I started as a commercial artist and I want to finish as a business artist. After I did the thing called ‘art’ or whatever it’s called, I wanted to be an art businessman or a Business Artist.”.

The pioneer Warhol also founded his art studio naming it the “Factory”, giving a strong message to all his “clients” and, as a public figure, society.

Moreover, the studio name well represents the methods by which he creates his works, characterized by indus-

trial processes and techniques. The gesture also implies that the paintings, photographs and films, as well as the fashion, music and advertisements produced in the Factory were nothing but consumer goods and that Warhol himself was nothing but the manager responsible for their production. As he himself stated, “I think everybody should be a machine. I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me”17, making clear that his work no longer resulted from solitary inspiration in a studio, but could be described as a group enterprise.

In 1967 Warhol hired Fred Hughes as business manager for the Factory in order to convert it into a profitable business and in 1968 the Factory moved to the Union building, turning it more into an office space than an artist’s studio. By naming what used to be the artist’s studio a factory in the first place and by increasingly turning it into his headquarter over the years, Warhol also turned himself into the head of a company. The new image of the artist corresponded to a new attitude of art collectors, who started to 44

consider collecting art in similar terms to the acquisition of stock bonds: the buying decision was now based on an investment logic. At the same time, gallerists became the brand managers of those new “branded” artists, by presenting and so collocating their artworks at the best conditions on the market. The process of identification between the artist persona and the businessman has its roots in the new approach of the artists to society. First of all, they gained degrees in the art fields so that being an artist was more a matter of profession than a rebellion for self research. As the artist Lawrence Weiner stated in an interview, “the art schools seem to be trying to turn people out as professional”. That was also supported by the emergence of new professional figures related to the development of the postindustrial economy after World War II, characterized by a managerial and service kind of economy. As John Howkins observes, “creativity is not new and neither in economics, but what is new is the nature and extent of the relationship between them, and how they 45

Original Fake Companion, KAWS

combine to create extraordinary value and wealth” so that we can properly talk about ‘creative industries’.

Intellectual rights have become central as the capital of the creative economy and creativity has come to occupy a core function in the business world. It also came out that nowadays the creative industries account for an estimated 7 per cent of the world’s GDP and have a growth forecast much stronger than that of the overall economies.

Creative industries have a very flexible structure granted by a vertical disintegration, which means that the final product is achieved with the co-operation of many firms and that allows to buffer the entrepreneurial risk and the latter supplying creativity and innovation. In recent years this coupling of art and the commercial sphere has been propelled in various ways, most notably by such internationally successful artists as Takashi Murakami, Olafur Eliasson, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and of course KAWS (also known as Brian Donnely) who brought his huge sculptures directly onto the market, selling them as mini toys at museums or at 46

Original Fake, a collaborative store with Medicom Toy in Tokyo.

As Hirst stated, “Warhol really brought money into the equation. He made it acceptable for artists to think about money. In the world we live in today, money is a big issue. It’s as big as love, maybe even bigger.” The British artist has taken up the subject of money in much of his art. Hirst’s genius consists in getting people to buy his works, so to figure him as a brand because the art form of the 21st century is marketing.

To name other few prominent examples: Takashi Murakami designed a pattern for Vuitton bags and had them shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007/2008, moreover a Vuitton shop was included as part of the exhibition.

Also, Murakami sells merchandise for his work, including T-shirts, bags, pens and mouse pads that bear his designs and are similar to the offerings of a museum gift shops, yet produced and sold under his own aegis. Furthermore, Olafur Eliasson created the “Eye See You” objects that went on 47

display in all Vuitton boutiques worldwide. Both Eliasson and Jeff Koons also participated in the BMW Art Car series, treading the narrow line between commissioned art and brand endorsement.

The model employed by contemporary artists in order to produce their artworks still follows what the pioneer Andy Warhol had instituted once with his Factory prototype as a studio. All those artists in facts employ many people in their art studio to make their works: Koons has a team of 120 people and, such as Warhol once did, he represents the manager and art director who needs to keep at distance the actual production of work. Describing the process he says, “It’s a hub. A lot of different information comes together here from a lot of different areas. At a certain point, I realized I needed to have other people work with me because I wanted to control the production. At the end of the day, it’s exactly the same responsibility.

As long as you are making the gesture that you want to make, it’s the same.

Plus, sometimes, if you are involved in making a work from start to finish, sitting and painting or whatever, the material can seduce you and you can just get lost in the journey. You can set out to make a turkey and end up making a bear. When you have more distance, you can make clearer decisions.�

A contemporary example is provided by Daniel Arsham.

The colour blind artist was one of those commissioned

by LVM to contribute illustrations for their annual travel book series and out of the extensive list of countries he could choose from, Arsham chose to dwell on Easter Island, an island so remote that it is at least a six-hour plane ride to the nearest slice of land.

Fictional Archeology, Daniel Arsham

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3.1 49

M a r i n a Abramovic and the MAI Institute

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Marina Abramovic is a Yugoslavia-born performance artist who has been described as the “grandmother of performance art�. She is mostly famous for her 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York The Artist is Present: during this performance, Abramovic engaged in mutual gaze with more than one thousand strangers over the course of three months, just sitting at a table in front of visitors.

Her works are focused on investigating about the physical limits of the body and offer every time a strong image of impact to the audience.

The artist collaborated many times with fashion brands, in particular with the Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci and lately with Adidas Originals too.

In occasion of the 2014 soccer World Cup the artist had been commissioned by the sportswear brand to produce a short movie in which the team spirit is represented as a winner model compared to individualistic methods.

Moreover, well embodying the figure of the artist as entrepreneur, Abramovic recently founded the 51

Marina Abramovic Institute (MAI), which aims to teach the artist’s method in order to keep on with her artistic research.

“

The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind.

�

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3.2 53

Visual Arts and the Music Market

There is often a trade-off between artistic authenticity and commerciality.

This relationship seems to be particularly relevant in the musical field. From Lady Gaga to Radiohead, some of the world’s most talented musicians have enlisted the help of famous artists to create some truly memorable album covers. This is due to the sensitivity of the artist, who through images is able to visually represent what the composer musically intends to express, offering to a potential buyer of the album a preview of what he is about to listen to.

As for The Velvet Underground, before finding worldwide fame, they were the house band at Andy Warhol’s Factory.

So it makes sense that the legendary artist would design their self-titled debut.

Early copies featured a peel-away yellow banana skin sticker that revealed a bare pink banana. The album’s cover was expensive to manufacture, which delayed the album’s release, but the record label believed the cost was worth the effort if it meant having Warhol’s name attached to it.

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“He just made it possible for us to be ourselves and go right ahead with it because he was Andy Warhol” Lou Reed once said. “In a sense he really did produce [the album] because he was this umbrella that absorbed all the attacks when we weren’t large enough to be attacked.”

Artist Jeff Koons contributed to the Artpop (2013) cover album for Lady Gaga, representing a collage that included Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, and of course his glistening blue metal ball sculpture kept in Gaga’s hands. But this relying on artists for album covers finds its recruits not only in the pop music world. In 2011, the American artist Gregory Euclide collaborated with the Justin Vernon of Bon Iver to create the band’s acclaimed album artwork for their 2011 album Bon Iver, winner of the Grammy for Best New Artist.

1. Damien Hirst for Red Hot Chilli Peppers 2. Keith Haring for David Bowie

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Colour as the Artist’s Sign

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3.2

As a new figure of entrepreneur, the artist has to get its artworks as easily recognizable as possible: his products have to reveal specific and unique features, in order to immediately communicate the artist’s value to the viewer, allowing it to be quickly attributable to its creator.

From this perspective, artists like Anish Kapoor and Yves Klein promptly bought exclusive rights for the usage of specific colours, the “Vantablack” for Kapoor and the “International Klein Blue” for the latter respectively. Anish Kapoor provoked the fury of fellow artists by acquiring the exclusive rights to the blackest black in the world. Known as “Vantablack”, the pigment is so dark that it absorbs 99.96% of light.

The colour is produced by the UK firm Surrey NanoSystems and was developed for military purposes such as the painting of stealth jets. The Indian-born British artist has been working and experimenting with the “super black” paint since 2014 and has recently acquired exclusive rights to the pigment.

Yet the case isn’t unprecedented. In 1960, Klein created and patented the ultramarine colour known as “International Klein Blue” or IKB. He invented the paint with the help of a chemical retailer by suspending pure, dry pigment in crystal-clear synthetic resin and compatible solvents (ether and petroleum).

Unlike traditional binders, the new colourless carrier did not dull the individual particles of pigment, but left them with their original brightness and intensity. In the years leading up to 1960 Yves Klein had been refining his use of colour, striving to capture a shade of blue that would encompass his entire experience – eradicating the horizon and combining the earth and the sky, laying bare the range of his own emotions, unlocking an experience of the endless void of space, but the right blue was hard to find.

Klein attributed a particular role to the colour blue, which embodied for him the most abstract aspects of tangible and visible nature, such as the sky and the sea.

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Also, in 2005 Peugeut Germany produced a one-of-a-kind Peugeut 1007, painted with that specific IKB: this limited edition model was sold on eBay in 2005 and the car firm donated its profits to the “Fondation Claude Pompidou� for the support of the mentally handicapped.

1. Blue Venus, Yves Klein 2. Cloud Gate (Chicago), Anish Kapoor 3 Untitled in Vanta Black, Anish Kapoor

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Howkins, John, The Creative Economy, London-New York, Penguin, 2001.

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This analysis intends to focus on the recent trend of hynridization between marketing and contemporary art throughout three principal levels: the blurring boundary between the art space and the commercial space; the shifting identity of the artwork and the consumer good and finally it will concentrate on the new figure of the artist persona nowadays more similar to an entrepreneur.

M(ART)KETING underlines contemporary phenomena in which the aestheticization of commerce and the commercialization of aesthetics converge.