“ The art market generates interest far beyond its size because it brings together great wealth, enormous egos, greed, passion and controversy in a way matched by few other industries.”
Fiammetta Rocco and Sarah Thornton, The Economist , 2009
THE ART WORLD TODAY
We live in a world that is intrigued and enthralled by art. Governments engage in demonstrations of soft power via multibillion-dollar investments in art infrastructure. Billionaires massage their egos by contemplating the size of their art collections. Lesser personages flaunt their cultural credentials by Instagramming themselves at gallery openings and global art events. Meanwhile, the world of art and its showcase markets have the complete attention of all serious media. Respected financial journals will just as readily devote column space to artworld dealings as they will to the buying and selling of businesses.
Global business journal The Economist noted how the art market “generates interest far beyond its size because it brings together great wealth, enormous egos, greed, passion and controversy in a way matched by few other industries.” [1] Even financial crises, pandemics and wars do not seem to interfere with the business of art in the 21st century: in 2008, the two-day Damien Hirst auction Beautiful Inside My Head Forever famously raised £111m ($198m) the day after Lehman Brothers went bust. The days when Andy Warhol was able to caustically – and plausibly –remark that, “Most people in America think Art is a man’s name,” are long gone. Artists have become heroes and contemporary art the epitome of pop culture. Film and TV have helped in making icons of one-time provocateurs with paint, such as Frida Kahlo (portrayed by Salma Hayek in the 2002 film Frida, which she also co-produced), Jean-Michel Basquiat (played by Jeffrey Wright in Basquiat, 1996), Jackson Pollock (Ed Harris, Pollock, 2000) and Andy Warhol, whose bewigged impersonators have so far included David Bowie, Crispin Glover, Guy Pearce and Bill Hader. While they may not have been depicted on screen by A-list actors –or not yet, anyway – the likes of Ai Weiwei, Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, David Hockney, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst are all but household names. Artists are cool; contemporary art is hot. When Spike Lee adapted his 1986 film, She’s Gotta Have It, into a Netflix series in 2017, he made the lead protagonist a Brooklyn-based artist. A few years earlier, Sarah Jessica Parker executive-produced a reality show on Bravo, in which up-and-coming artists competed for a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Even in its most avant-garde forms, art today is a rock-solid crowdpuller. When, in 2021, Christo (1935–2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935–2009) posthumously wrapped the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, six million people came to see it. In 2019, six million people also visited London’s Tate Modern, while Paris’s Centre Pompidou and New York’s MoMA museums receive three-and-a-half million and three million people, respectively, every year.
▲ Georgics 5:30 by Vadim de Grainville, 2017
WHY BRANDS OFTEN DECIDE TO ENGAGE WITH ART
EXHIBIT 1.2
MOST BRANDS ENGAGE WITH CONTEMPORARY ART AND CULTURE FOR:
CONTENT
Artists can curate brand experiences and provide shareable content.
INNOVATION
Art has the potential to foster a brand’s creativity in product development and communication.
NOVELTY
Artist collaborations can create an impression of liveliness, freshness and energy.
MESSAGING
Art can be used to tell stories about a brand’s heritage, legacy and values in a differentiated way.
TARGETING
Art is a way of connecting with the rich and famous.
⊳ ▲ Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, 1434, served as inspiration for Utopian Fantasy, the Gucci Spring/Summer 2018 campaign with wall paintings by Ignasi Monreal (see page 72)
⊳ For Dior’s Autumn/Winter 2013 campaign, Secret Garden 2 Versailles, photographers Inez & Vinoodh posed models and Dior products à la Édouard Manet’s 1862–63 work, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (see page 38)
EMPLOYEE MOTIVATION
Art has the power to bolster the morale, commitment, loyalty and creativity of those working for the brand.
CONTENT
Marketing today is less about advertising than it is about content. Increasingly, marketing is driven by social media with its instantaneous global reach, and social media is voracious. Brands are desperate for content to feed it. But not just any content. When people can receive an endless stream of messaging and posts every day, brands need to find a way to break through and engage with clients – ideally by entertaining, providing insight and meaning, and delivering a sense of elevation. Art frequently provides impactful content and artists are edgy content providers. For high-quality aspirational brands, the key benefit of content marketing through art lies in its ability to seduce, persuade and evangelise even the most discerning audience in a language of elevated aesthetics and culture. In short: art can transcend the ordinary.
COLLABORATION 2
BRAND IMPACT
The degree of influence and permanence generated for the brand by an art engagement programme
CULTURAL IMPACT
The strength of cultural agency
TYPES OF PATRONAGE
There are many forms of patronage through which aspirational brands can and do engage with art. The deeper and wider the engagement, the stronger the influence the brand exerts over its clients and wider circle of stakeholders, and the stronger the brand impact becomes. It is important to note that a brand can be engaged in several forms of patronage at the same time.
1. PATRONAGE OF AN ARTIST’S PROJECT OR EXHIBITION
This elemental form of patronage is essential in order for art to thrive. There’s no limit to the ambition and imagination of contemporary artists –the limitations come in the form of the money needed to execute the work. For example, when I entered into discussions with multidisciplinary artist William Kentridge (b.1955) about the possibility of a collaboration with Absolut some years ago, we were looking at a minimum spend of $200,000 to $300,000 – not because the artist was greedy, but because of the ambition of this particular opera-based project.
That sort of sum is chickenfeed compared to the amounts involved in some acts of patronage. Monumenta was an incredible initiative launched by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication in 2007. The idea was to invite, annually, one internationally renowned contemporary artist to produce a single work of art to fill the main hall of the Grand Palais in Paris –a space longer, taller and wider than the vast Turbine Hall at Tate Modern.
The invited artists responded to the challenge with epic artworks on a truly monumental scale: Promenade, 2008, by American sculptor Richard Serra (1938–2024), for example, involved five giant rusted steel slabs, each one 17 metres high. Three years later, British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor (b.1954) overwhelmed the public with the aptly named Leviathan, 2011, a giant inflated structure composed of four connected ellipses that stood 37 metres high; Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping (1954–2019) created Empires, 2016 – a serpentine skeleton of a 130-tonne aluminium snake.
The financial entailments of such exhibitions are not made publicly available, however various good sources have indicated costs of somewhere around €3m to €5m per exhibition. The French state would have contributed half that amount, which was put towards installation
“I would claim that art and culture… have proven that one can create a kind of a space which is both sensitive to individuality and to collectivity.”
Olafur Eliasson, TED talk, 2009
“In my view, to be included is not only a case of feeling that you are part of a situation – it is about being given the mandate to co-author, to co-constitute. And to extend this thought to a planetary level: inclusive thinking requires expanding our awareness to embrace other species, plants, weather systems, ocean currents, glaciers, and so on.”
Olafur
WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM OLAFUR ELIASSON?
Olafur Eliasson is well aware of the possibilities of art for change, noting that: “the art world underestimates its own relevance when it insists on always staying inside the art world. Maybe one can take some of the tools, methodologies [of art], and see if one can apply them to something outside the art world.” [7] One such methodology brands can learn from Eliasson is his ability to create ruptures and critical friction. His works wrongfoot his audiences and make a positive of doubt – a strategy that could be useful for brands focused on innovation. Additionally, many of the artist’s projects are embedded with messages related to climate change and human accountability – both of which should be on the agenda of any global brand.
The most significant takeaway from Eliasson’s method and approach is how the artist fosters engagement with the public. This is something he takes very seriously – to the point of drawing on the work of experts such as Elke Weber, professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University. She sees decision-making as being at the nexus of psychology, economics, political science and business management. With her help, Eliasson has dug into fundamental questions about human behaviour, decision-making and engagement. When do we engage? When do we ignore or grow numb?
In my opinion, Eliasson achieves a strong connection with his audience thanks to his humbleness, his ability to engage with the issues of the moment, his simple, universal messaging and superb quality of execution (a must for any successful endeavour, artistic or otherwise), but also, importantly, through a combination of three elements that I would say are fairly unique to him. Let me elaborate.
ELEMENT 1: BALANCING OUT INDIVIDUALITY AND COLLECTIVITY
As mentioned, Eliasson’s practice has long been centred on concerns to do with notions of public inclusion and civic trust. Understanding our impact on the world and its impact on us, and asking questions about notions of community and responsibility toward others is a crucial part of that. To this end, his works engender a sense of social synchronisation. This was seen in the way that visitors to Riverbed tended to move at the same pace and follow the same routes around the installation, despite there being no clear path through it. It occurred, too, in the way people joined in touching and listening to the cracking of the ice blocks in Ice Watch. Or indulged in a spot of spontaneous “sunbathing” at The weather project
These artworks operate on two levels simultaneously: the individual and the collective. In one sense, the viewer experiences a heightened awareness of their own presence at the scale (among other things) of Eliasson’s creation. At the same time, they are invited to recognise that they belong to a much bigger whole, and so experience a heightened feeling of connection and, possibly, responsibility as a result.
Good art does this: you are able to find yourself in the artwork and at the same time connect to others in the collective experience through the artwork. This is what high-quality aspirational brands need to do: for so long many such brands have been obsessed with creating an aura of exclusivity when the goal should be to balance exclusivity with inclusivity. Rather, they need to promote the notion of individuality, while fostering the comfort of belonging that comes from a connection with like-minded people. [7]
Eliasson, An Exchange of Thoughts, 2020