Arte, branding e brand performance (pt. 1)

“Although marketing practices have been widely applied in the field of art, there remains a concern that a ‘barrier’ still exists between the arts and the business world, where art is seen as an autonomous entity, without any involvement from the commercial world.” These are the words spoken by Victoria L. Rodner and Finola Kerrigan in their paper The art of branding − lessons from visual artists, in 2014.

“The intellectual, disciplinary, and semiotic separation between art and business has obscured the potential of studying the art market as an example of image-based branding.” These words are by Jonathan Schroeder from his 2005 work The artist and the brand.

In these contributions, and in others we will cite, we try to identify the correlations between the branch of marketing that studies branding and the world of art, particularly visual art.

Damien Hirst

We can identify three main strands of correlation:

• how artists can inspire commercial companies in their approach to branding;

• how global companies have used art and artists to elevate their brands;

• how artists use branding techniques to enhance their positioning and gain more fame or money, effectively making them brand managers of themselves.

There are several studies suggesting how companies can take cues from artists to innovate the way they build their brand. Jörn-Axel Meyer and Ralf Even in Marketing and the Fine Arts – Inventory of a Controversial Relationship define the artist as an innovator and entrepreneur, financially dependent, who does not find products for customers, but instead looks for customers for their products. In a self-oriented marketing approach, the artist is the producer and the first customer of their own work.

The artists first creates for themselves, aiming to express personal content outwardly; then, they seek recognition from the art system and its closest operators. Finally, at a third level, they embrace the interest in gaining large-scale visibility, with the goal of monetizing their work and the success they have achieved.

Credits Hirschman Aesthetics Ideologies and the Limits of the Marketing Concept 1983

This process is exactly reversed compared to what marketing and branding books of past decades suggest, where one first studies the market, then defines “buyer personas,” then constructs suitable storytelling to gain support from media and the distribution chain, and finally creates a product tailored to those personas and those stories. From this point of view, the art system seems less controllable. But after all, the artist, in their personal drive, does not have the immediate need for economic recognition. On this, we consider fundamental a monumental work developed in 2000 by economists Tyler Cowen and Alexander Tabarrok, An Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and Popular Art, or High and Low Culture, where they mathematically correlate the two major variables pushing the artist into a perennial conflict between satisfaction and freedom of expression on one hand, and economic success on the other. Artists seek fame as the main non-monetary component of art and want to be remembered in history as significant creators.

We can draw important reflections. The first distinguishes the world of visual art from other arts, such as theater or cinema. The two researchers correlate these arts with the capital needed to reach a finished product. Typically, a visual artwork requires very few, almost no financial resources. More resources are needed for a theater production, while for a film substantial resources are required. This is, for example, one reason why visual art has more opportunities to generate avant-garde movements and express a process that really starts from the product and not the market. This inversion in the value chain, which reverses product quality in terms of creative coherence and economic return, has created a unique phenomenon: the art system.

Credits Rodner Thomson The art machine dynamics of a value generating mechanism for contemporary art

In no other sector, like in visual art, are ‘peers’—that is, operators close to the producer—so decisive for the actual success of the artist.” The fundamental research we highlight is The art machine: dynamics of a value generating mechanism for contemporary art by Victoria L. Rodner and Elaine Thomson, which shows how from art schools, through galleries, critics, fairs, collectors, museums, and art fairs, a rather closed system is established that operates in unison as an interdependent branding mechanism. This “art machine” therefore acts as a branded and branding legitimization structure, in which influential individuals and institutions actively work to build a brand on behalf of the artists.The ridiculously low manufacturing cost of visual art allows artists to express their creativity without too many constraints. Due to the often not immediately understandable nature of their product, and because it is not really created with an ideal consumer in mind, the product is thrown into a closed system—the art system—which acts as a branding machine and, in some cases, actually helps create a brand.

Jeff Koons Balloon Dog

The second reflection is aimed at consumer goods companies, which can draw important lessons by observing artists and the art world in the way they do branding. The first element is related to ideological independence. A quality artist, one who will emerge as a winner through the mechanisms of the art machine, works (ideally) independently of the need to please the market. This is how companies in other sectors can choose to follow artistic models, promoting the artistic integrity of their products, self-definition, and ideological independence (Elizabeth Hirschman, Aesthetics, ideologies and the limits of the marketing concept, in Journal of Marketing, vol. 47, 1983).

In every way, some examples are given by Apple, Samsung, or Google—at least in their start-up phases. The start-up model is particularly similar to that of artists: most start-ups have an idea not yet validated by the market and develop products starting from an intuition, initially trying not to be influenced by what the market demands. Success must come with a discontinuity, because the start-up, as a rule, does not want to attack a slice of an existing market, but rather wants to create a new one. The way Dietrich Markwart Eberhart Mateschitz made Red Bull a global company—working for years on perfecting a product for which no reference market existed—is arguably similar to the creation of a work of art.

Andy Warhol Brillo Box

Even in the case of “branded” artists such as Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons, gallery owners and auction houses have played a fundamental role through million-dollar sales. However, it is very likely that auction houses implemented classic branding strategies (carefully planned economic and brand awareness returns), leveraging their authority in the art system (see the aforementioned paper by Victoria L. Rodner and Elaine Thomson). A clear example is the million-dollar sale of Beeple’s NFT or Banksy’s Girl with Balloon—operations that can certainly be identified more as “brand performance” (our term) than as disinterested mediation.

Banksy Love is in the Bin

These “brand performances” are not uncommon in the art sector and aim to bring brand equity to an artist through techniques that intertwine finance and performance, playing on the sensationalism of large sums and the difficulty the general public—and the media—have in understanding the dynamics and authority these operators have acquired. Certainly, watching the live destruction of a work of art, while it is being auctioned for nearly a million, has its media appeal. What remains to be understood is whether, given the figures and the legal and regulatory aspects of a public auction, it has formal correctness.New media enter like a doping agent into the traditional branding system of artists—but we will discuss this in a later part of the article.