Brand Standing

Paul Dennis Garrett

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

(By creative work and dissertation)

February-2011

Victorian College of the Arts

The University of Melbourne

Declaration

This is to certify that

(i) The thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD except where indicated in the Preface;

(ii) Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used;

(iii) The thesis is 47,872 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices.

Supervisors

Professor Su Baker Director, Faculty of the VCA and Music Victorian College of Arts University of Melbourne

Professor Marie Sierra Head, School of Creative Arts University of Tasmania

Paul Garrett

School of Art Victorian College of the Arts University of Melbourne Southbank Victoria 3006 Australia

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title of Paper - Standing......

Declaration......

Abstract ...... 1

Introduction – The Art of Brand Standing...... 3

Chapter 1 – Me My Art and Self ...... 15

Chapter 2 – A Brand New Aesthetic Value ...... 41

Chapter 3 – Living in a Branded State of Mind...... 65

Chapter 4 – Fame, Death, Brands and Auctions...... 79

Subhead - Fame I had the Idea Hirst...... 88

Chapter 5 – Trust Me I Am A Dealer ...... 103

Conclusion ...... 119

List of References Cited [Bibliography]...... 127

Illustrations listed (For images refer to disk)...... 138

ABSTRACT

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate and to demonstrate differences between the arts and everyday branded commodities in the context of the free market as demonstrated through the particular circumstances of some key highly acclaimed and commercially successful artists in the late twentieth century. The scope of this study was determined and guided by the evolution of the art market itself, referring to art and artists who held or hold the highest positions of value (monetarily at least) post World War II. Through a comprehensive literature review, an understanding was gained of this field and, in particular, in relation to notions of value and techniques of in conventional branding terms and the relationships between art, and . From my research, however, it became clear that concepts of value and art and branding were viewed in two separate camps. In the case of artwork, a commodity of value was often characterised by factors such as the artist’s name and reputation, as defined by the critical judgements of history, versus the specific aesthetic value of the specific object. This value system impacts on the secondary market as determined by auction houses and dealers. It is the assertion of this research that much of the status of a commodity, such as the work discussed in this thesis, has been shaped and determined by the persuasive tools and techniques reminiscent of advertisers and marketeers.

This research intends to contribute to this critical conversation through an examination of both fields, and to pose the question of how, at the high end of the art market, value is ascertained and developed into a brand currency of “art”. In both the dissertation and the studio outcomes, this became an experiment in overlaying the advertising and the marketing terms of branding upon artists and their work. Two artists, who came into focus at the centre of this research, were Andy and . These choices were dictated by their place and value in the art market with its highly volatile auction system of valuation. Artists such as Warhol and Hirst act as a point of reference for explaining the seeming merger of art and branding. They also allow a basis from which to explore my own relationship to art and branding, as my past encapsulates both, having spent many years in the advertising profession. It is my contention that research in advertising was gathered not to enlighten but to merge the brand identity of the product with that of the desires of the consumer.

Donald Kuspit, American art critic and writer, views this as a merger between the arts and advertising and why branding as a term sits so comfortably upon the art world and the artists that reside in it. Why? Because, for Kuspit, this is now a world of cultural status, brands and celebrity with the most valuable commodity to be found not within an artwork but the personality of the artist who made it.

1

The exhibition of work created as part of this research brought together these relationships both, on the one hand, as an articulation of these propositions, and on the other as a merger and amalgamation of the two seemingly contradictory conceptual fields.

Examining how art has been valued and received post World War II under the persuasive pressures of advertisers and marketeers lies at the centre of my research. An approach was undertaken by examining the marketeer’s most persuasive tool brands, both theoretical and visual, to question the meaning of art as a commodity today. With the help of selected artists, theorists and critics, my position has been one of illumination. If a conclusion has to be made on the impact of branding, it would be that art’s reception and value as a cultural artifact is not to be found in the aesthetic anymore. It has shifted away from the artwork to the artist who must be now seen to represent a branded symbol of monetary value and exchange.

As a subject, branding is relevant to anyone who operates and lives within a free market, as it encapsulates signifiers that are understood by all who reside in it - desire, celebrity, money, status and taste. To bring awareness to the subject of branding is to reveal not just aspects of our western cultural framework, but also ourselves and the way we choose to make, collect and value the art within it.

2

Introduction

THE ART OF BRAND STANDING!

What role does Branding play in evaluating Art and the Identity of Artist?

This is a thesis to engage and research the commodity value of “Art” to “Branding”. The term branding is now commonplace within the public mindset, representing the image of both products and corporations alike. But can the term be applied to art and artists?

Author, Max Hollein says the world of consumer goods, its aesthetics and strategies, are a vital, integral part of our urban surroundings. Branded products, everyday objects, mass- produced consumer goods are primary hallmarks of a consumer-oriented society based upon a free-market economy. At the same time, the rituals and characteristics of shopping are often not far removed in their effect from those of the art world.1

Brands first appeared in America as early as 1870 but had been confined only to a few industries, such as patent medicine and tobacco products. The concept of the brand was not truly to be referenced until quite late into the twentieth century. After the Civil War in America, business there quickly realised that branded goods displayed good firm growth. The continued growth of branding in the proceeding decades was through the expertise and marketing of advertisers.2 Theorist Jean Baudrillard3 states that “advertising contributes nothing to production or to the direct practical applications of things, yet it plays an integral

1 Grunenberg Christoph, Hollein Max, Shopping : A Century of Art and Consumer Culture. 2002. pp.203 2 Fullerton A, Low S. George, Brands, Brand Management, and the Brand Manager System. 1994. pp.173-190

3 Jean Baudrillard was born in the cathedral town of Reims, France in 1929. He told interviewers that his grandparents were peasants and his parents became civil servants (Gane 1993: 19). Baudrillard also claims that he was the first member of his family to pursue an advanced education and that this led to a rupture with his parents and cultural milieu. In 1956, he began working as a professor of secondary education in a French high school (Lyceé) and in the early 1960s did editorial work for the French publisher Seuil. Baudrillard was initially a Germanist who published essays on literature in Les temps modernes in 1962-1963 and translated works of Peter Weiss and Bertolt Brecht into French, as well as a book on messianic revolutionary movements by Wilhelm Mühlmann. During this period, he met and studied the works of Henri Lefebvre, whose critiques of everyday life impressed him, and Roland Barthes, whose semiological analyses of contemporary society had lasting influence on his work. During the late 1960s, Baudrillard began publishing a series of books that would eventually make him world famous. Influenced by Lefebvre, Barthes, and s series of French thinkers, Baudrillard undertook serious work in the field of social theory, semiology, and psychoanalysis in the 1960s and published his first book The System of Objects in 1968 (1996), followed by a book on The Consumer Society in 1970 (1998), and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign in 1972 (1981). (a)

(a) Kellner, Douglas, "Jean Baudrillard", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2009 Edition) Advisor Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL. First published Fri Apr 22, 2005; substantive revision Wed Mar 7, 2007. URL = 3

part in the system of objects, not merely because it relates to consumption but also because it itself becomes an object to be consumed”.4

Expanding the relationship between an object from the commercial arts and the fine arts may find the role of branding in both.

In our current climate of over-saturated media technology and mass production, the artist must constantly evaluate the object and value of art.

The same applies in the marketing of a product. Seeing an inanimate object, such as a car, being branded with all our hopes dreams and desires activates the choices we each must make if we are buying into the consumer lifestyle. However, it is important to recognize the influence we all have within this debate.

Why choose the subject of advertising and branding in relation to the arts? The reason is that my own experience sits between both these fields, having spent many working years in and around advertising agencies. For to unravel the importance and value assigned to brands is to question not just a consumer lifestyle but what lies at the centre of western culture.

To place this within a historical context, my research focuses on the decades that come after the Second World War. In particular the 1960s-70s, where, for the arts and advertising at least, there was a great influx of change. It is here, in particular in the universities of France, that we find studies trying to understand the mechanics of advertising.

One school of thought in regard to the subject of advertising was semiology, attributed largely to Roland Barthes and Henri Lefebvre. New York University Theorist Mark Poster explains the terminology of semiology when he states:

Both Roland Barthes and Henri Lefebvre pioneered the critique of the media (Barthes first book, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953; Writing Degree Zero), was a literary that examined the arbitrariness of the constructs of language). In Mythologies 1957, Barthes illuminated the hidden, ideological significations of various communications systems. A cover of Paris-Match advertised the solidity of imperialism by showing a black man in a French army uniform. The surface signification was innocuous; but beneath it, at the

4 Baudrillard Jean, The System of Objects, 1996. p.164 4

unconscious level, the reader of Paris-Match imbibed the important message of ideological legitimating. For Barthes 5, semiology revealed how simple, rational information became mythic supports of the social system (a).

The Marxist humanist, Henri Lefebvre (1901-1999), always critical of structuralism, was willing to employ semiological categories to expand the analytical power of Marxism to encompass the experiences of everyday life. Lefebvre contended that advanced capitalism spread its oppressive tentacles beyond the workplace to the world of leisure and the family. The contradictions of capitalism had infested language itself, of which structuralism was a symptom not an analytical theory. Swiss thinker, Ferdinand de Saussure's (1857-1913) separation of the sign from the referent was not a scientific advance but an ideological cover for what Lefebvre called "the collapse of the referentials."

At the turn of the twentieth century the capitalist system became so irrational that the classical symbols of the liberal world-view-reason, progress, freedom-no longer coherently explained the world. Words became detached from things in society before structuralists adopted that separation as an analytical tool.

In addition to the collapse of the referentials, the structure of language underwent a shift from signs to signals. The sign embodied dialectic of word and mental image, a split between signifier and meaning. This gap allowed the

5 Roland Barthes, in full Roland Gérard Barthes (b. Nov. 12, 1915, Cherbourg, France—d. March 25, 1980, Paris), Frenchessayist and social and literary critic whose writings on semiotics, the formal study of symbols and signs pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure, helped and the New Criticism as leading intellectual movements. Barthes studied at the University of Paris, where he took a degree in establish structuralism classical letters in 1939 and in grammar and philology in 1943. After working (1952–59) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, he was appointed to the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1976 he became the first person to hold the chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France.

His first book, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953; Writing Degree Zero), was a literary manifesto that examined the arbitrariness of the constructs of language. In subsequent books—including Mythologies (1957), Essais critiques (1964; Critical Essays), and La Tour Eiffel (1964; The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies)—he applied the same critical apparatus to the “mythologies” (i.e., the hidden assumptions) behind popular cultural phenomena from advertising and fashion to the Eiffel Tower and wrestling. His Sur Racine (1963; On Racine) set off a literary furor in France, pitting Barthes against traditional academics who thought this “new criticism,” which viewed texts as a system of signs, was desecrating the classics.

Barthes’s literary style, which was always stimulating though sometimes eccentric and needlessly obscure, was widely imitated and parodied. Some thought his theories contained brilliant insights, while others regarded them simply as perverse contrivances. But by the late 1970s Barthes’s intellectual stature was virtually unchallenged, and his theories had become extremely influential not only in France but throughout Europe and in the United States. Other leading radical French thinkers who influenced or were influenced by him included the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, socio-historian Michel Foucault, and philosopher Jacques Derrida. (a)

(a) Barthes Roland, Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, Web. 31 Jan. 2011. 5

individual to question their correspondence as, for example, in the statement "France is a free nation." Increasingly, however, with the advent of modern advertising the signal took over. The semiotic structure of the signal collapsed word and image, conditioning the individual to accept the correspondence without the mediation of critical reason.

In an analysis of an advertisement for an after-shave lotion Lefebvre unveiled a new level of social terrorism. The message of the ad demanded the use of the product at the risk of social ostracism. At an unconscious level the reader's fear was manipulated to produce an immediate identification of the product with 6 social acceptance. In this way, Lefebvre integrated semiology with Marxism (b).

In his writing of 1957, Barthes came to the conclusion that in advertising we speak about ourselves. Far from accepting the idea of informative advertising whose sense is defined by theoretical discussion, Barthes sees advertising as speaking to our deeper desires and social myths7. Barthes’ philosophy and views on advertising in a way de-construct consumer culture, which is why other French theorists such as Jean Baudrillard8 may have found it so inspirational.

Baudrillard saw the brand label as the appearance of monopoly, capitalism, an integration of aesthetic and commodity, image and status. His analysis was one of sign-exchange, a shift from commodity to object.9 (A more expanded explanation can be read further on)

6 Poster Mark, Semiology and Critical Theory: From Marx to Baudrillard. Published by, Duke University Press.Source Boundary 2, Vol. 8, No 1, The Problems of reading in Contemporary American. A Symposium (Autumn, 1979), p275-288. URL: http:/www.jstor.org/stable/303152. (a) Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 116. (b) For an examination of Lefebvre's position see Mark Poster, Existential Marx-ism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 253-259. 7 Kennard Peter, Art is the New . Newstatesman. 2008. pp.38-40.

8 Early publications by Baudrillard are attempts, within the framework of critical sociology, to combine the studiesof everyday life initiated by Lefebvre (1971 and 1991 [1947]) with a social semiology that studies the life of signs in social life. This project, influenced by Barthes (1967 [1964], 1972 [1958], and 1983 [1967]), centers on the system of objects in the consumer society (the focus of his first two books), and the interface between political economy and semiotics (the nucleus of his third book) Baudrillard's early work was one of the first to appropriate semiology to analyze how objects are encoded with a system of signs and meanings that constitute contemporary media and consumer societies. Combining semiological studies, Marxian political economy, and sociology of the consumer society, Baudrillard began his life-long task of exploring the system of objects and signs which forms our everyday life. (a)

(a) Kellner, Douglas, "Jean Baudrillard", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2009 Edition) Advisor Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL. First published Fri Apr 22, 2005; substantive revision Wed Mar 7, 2007. URL =

9 Murray, Chris. Key Writers on Art. 2003. p.28 6

Advertisers as early as the 1940s understood that branding terminology meant far more than the promotion of a product. They knew it was about identity or “corporate consciousness” as it was phrased at the time. Naomi Klein says in her book, No Logo “The ad man ceased to see himself as a pitchman and instead saw himself as the Philosopher King of commercial culture.” She notes how agencies moved away from the individual products and attributes in search of the brand essence through psychological and anthropological examinations of what the brand means to the culture and people’s lives. They had understood consumers don’t buy manufacturer products – they buy brands.10

Brands have become easily identifiable icons within most cities around the world. Many have become a part of our urban landscape such as Nike, Coca-Cola, Sony, McDonalds, FedEx or Kit Kat. It is, however, not just corporate products that can be branded. It is often overlooked that almost anyone or thing can be packaged up and branded. Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Madonna and Tom Cruise are just a few examples of individuals that exemplify the power of branding.

The art world is also not adverse to an injection of brand power. Individuals such as Matthew Barney, Tracy Emin, Damien Hirst or can testify to its positive profiling. So can museums such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Guggenheim in New York, or the NGV in Australia – all are active participants in the art of brand standing a belief in the strength of one’s brand.

It is not simply, however, packaging up the item, person or product into a symbol and bright colours. A platform of integrity and longevity from which to stand must be established – a platform that encompasses intangibles, aspects of value and emotional associations. Advertisers refer it to as the “brand identity”. For consumers, it is the reason why a brand becomes something of value and worth having. In Baudrillard theories these emotional connection are referred to as sign –value, explained here by UCLA theorist Douglas Kellner:

The early Baudrillard described the meanings invested in the objects of everyday life (e.g., the power accrued through identification with one's automobile when driving) and the structural system through which objects were organized into a new modern society (e.g., the prestige or sign-value of a new sports car). Situating his analysis of signs and everyday life in a historical framework, Baudrillard argued that the transition from the earlier stage of competitive

10 Klein, Naomi, No Logo, Flamingo 2000, 2001, p.7 7

market capitalism to the stage of monopoly capitalism required increased attention to demand management, to augmenting and steering consumption11. At this historical stage, from around 1920 to the 1960s, the need to intensify demand supplemented concern with lowering production costs and with expanding production. In this era of capitalist development, economic concentration, new production techniques, and the development of new technologies, accelerated capacity for mass production and capitalist corporations focused increased attention on managing consumption and creating needs for new prestigious goods, thus producing the regime of what Baudrillard has called sign-value.12

As art is not autonomous from the free market, it too must be equated with a sign value of identity and worth, making this thesis as much about value as about branding. For any object placed upon the market place today must be assigned a value no matter how small. With this in mind, value runs parallel to branding throughout the text of this document, with perhaps the slight exception of my own chapter. In this chapter aptly named Me, My Art Brands and Self, the intent is one of explanation and descriptive passages contained between the practical and theoretical aspects of the research.

What my chapter does present, however, is a field of research upon which to place key figures for questioning art and branding as a system of value. Questions, such as, if value is bestowed or projected upon the artist by branding then by whom and what means is this achieved?

11 On Baudrillard's analysis, advertising, packaging, display, fashion, “emancipated” sexuality, andculture, and the proliferation of commodities multiplied the quantity of signs and spectacles, and produced a proliferation of sign-value. Henceforth, Baudrillard claims, commodities are not merely to be characterized by use-value and exchange value, as in Marx's theory of the commodity, but sign-value — the expression and mark of style, prestige, luxury, power, and so on — becomes an increasingly important part of the commodity and consumption. From this perspective, Baudrillard claims that commodities are bought and displayed as much for their sign-value as their use-value, and that the phenomenon of sign-value has become an essential constituent of the commodity and consumption in the consumer society.

This position was influenced by Veblen's notion of “conspicuous consumption” and display of commodities analyzed in his Theory of the Leisure Class that Baudrillard argued has become extended to everyone in the consumer society. For Baudrillard, the entire society is organized around consumption and display of commodities through which individuals gain prestige, identity, and standing. In this system, the more prestigious one's commodities (houses, , clothes, and so on), the higher one's standing in the realm of sign value. Thus, just as words take on meaning according to their position in a differential system of language, so sign values take on meaning according to their place in a differential system of prestige and status. (a)

(a) (Kellner, Douglas, "Jean Baudrillard", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2009 Edition) Advisor Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL. First published Fri Apr 22, 2005; substantive revision Wed Mar 7, 2007. URL =

12 Kellner, Douglas, "Jean Baudrillard", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2009 Edition) Advisor Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL. First published Fri Apr 22, 2005; substantive revision Wed Mar 7, 2007.URL = 8

A case in point being chapter two, A Brand New Aesthetic Value, that looks at key factors shaping and bestowing terminology of value upon artifacts within a western consumer culture. For example, mass production and Fordism, which emanated at the turn of the twentieth century. This is a time period that reveals money and value moving from individuals to machinery, production and media, plus the emergence of what is now termed a consumer culture. From here on labour processing and mass production were to become indicators of value, which in turn became imposed on the individual and the product through those who controlled and oversaw the labour process. Due to such changes in cultural evaluation and worth it was not surprising that its cause, mass production and consumption, impacted the views and focus of the artist.

One in particular was the French artist Marcel Duchamp13. He, more than other artist at the turn of the twentieth century, anticipated the rise of a consumer culture through the ever- increasing output of mass produced and readymade objects by presenting them as artworks. The most famous example of this being a store bought white porcelain urinal, titled Fountain 1912. Tony Godfrey in his book comments on the relevance of the readymade to art when he says:

There, are of course, precedents for Fountain and Duchamp’s readymades. We could think of the way in which the Catholic Church has treated relics of the

13 Marcel Duchamp, (b. July 28, 1887, Blainville, Fr.—d. Oct. 2, 1968, Neuilly). Duchamp was a French artist who broke down the boundaries between works of art and everyday objects. A case in point “ Descending a Staircase, No. 2” presented to the 28th Salon des Indépendants, in February 1912. The committee, composed of friends of the Duchamp family, refused to hang the painting. These men were not reactionaries and were well accustomed to Cubism, yet they were unable to accept the novel vision. A year later at the Armory Show in , the painting again was singled out from among hundreds that were equally shocking to the public. Whatever it was that made the work so scandalous in Paris, and in New York such tremendous success, prompted Duchamp to stop painting at the age of 25. A widely held belief is that Duchamp introduced in his work a dimension of irony, almost a mockery of painting itself, that was more than anyone could bear and that undermined his own belief in painting. The title alone was a joke that was resented. Even the Cubists did their best to flatter the eye, but Duchamp’s only motive seemed to be provocation.

Like the “Nude,” another of Duchamp’s works titled “The Large Glass” was to be unique among works of modern painting. Between 1913 and 1923, During this period a stroke of genius led him to a discovery of great importance in contemporary art, the so-called ready-made. In 1913 he produced the “Bicycle Wheel,” which was simply an ordinary bicycle wheel. In 1914, “Pharmacy” consisted of a commercial print of a winter landscape, to which he added two small figures reminiscent of pharmacists’ bottles. It was nearly 40 years before the ready- mades were seen as more than a derisive gesture against the excessive importance attached to works of art, before their positive values were understood. With the ready-mades, contemporary art became in itself a mixture of creation and criticism. Duchamp was friendly with the Dadaists, and in the 1930s he helped to organize Surrealist exhibitions. He became a U.S. citizen in 1955. He was more than 70 years old when he emerged in the United States as the secret master whose entirely new attitude toward art and society, far from being negative or nihilistic, had led the way to Pop art, Op art, and many of the other movements embraced by younger artists everywhere. Not only did he change the visual arts but he also changed the mind of the artist. (a)

(a) Lebel Robert, (Primary contributor). "Marcel Duchamp." Article from Encyclopædia Britannica. Credit: George Grantham Bain Collection/ (Digital File Number: cph 3b10889] 2011. . 9

saints. A bone a fingernail or a scrap of hair, if it is believed to be from the body of some saint or revered person, it is treated as something special.

Fountain had been up for exhibition but, also for sale and hence also raised questions about objects as commodities, and why we collect. In a secular society collecting has absorbed some of the function that religion once had. As the German critic and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin said, ‘ the collector always retains some traces of fetishist, and by owning the work of art, shares in its ritual power’. Collecting - and perhaps the drive to collect is inherent in all people living in culture - it is about giving special significance to certain objects: ‘This is my very best Barbie doll!’ ‘This is the ring my grandmother wore at her wedding!’ ‘This is my most beautiful piece of Minton china’ ‘This is mine!’14

For Benjamin, the object can symbolize value far beyond the static of form - it’s about the inherent fetish of the maker or owner. A fetish that, from my research at least, sees a shift in value from the artwork to the artist by means of fame and celebrity.

It is at this point that branding value and art collide, for if a brand value can be assigned to the artist it is only because of shifts in how value is viewed within the market. A market that in chapter three A Branded State of Mind reveals advertising and media possess great influence when shaping the beliefs and values of the consumer in regard to brands, be it products or celebrities. For to invest in a celebrity as a brand, is to believe in the monetary power of a personality to become a denominator of exchange, which if viewed in regard to the artist makes them both seller and commodity of value within the market place. This was the case for Donald Kuspit in his book The End of Art where artists operate in a post-art world, (post modern world) bestowed with monetary value through being a personality and celebrity, Kuspit states:

“Having personality is more important than being a person. Indeed there’s no need to be a person these days - no need to have human values - only a knowledgeable consumer. One only needs to know the exchange value of human beings. Similarly, there is no need to know the human value of art, only it’s value in the market. Marketing confuses values; we readily mistake inhuman value for human values because the former are so well packaged, which is the problem with post-art. The spectator has become the customer; he has to be

14 Godfrey Tony, Conceptual Art. Phaidon Press, 1998, 1999, p.31-32 10

confused – morally and intellectually – to invest in post-art, emotionally and economically.”15

How this emotional attachment and integration plays out between the markets, consumers, spectators and artists, brings us to the subject and discussion held within the final two chapters. Within these chapters we find the domain of investment and speculation where art’s value is being accessed not by artistic merit but by the celebrity status of the artist as a brand. This is the internal force of the art world in the guise of Auction Houses, Dealers, and Art Fairs who shape and influence the profiles of artists as branded commodities within the markets. These chapters reveal a change in the term branded art, for up to this point within the research, art’s value as a brand has been dominated by shifts in consumer thinking through factors such as media, mass production, technology, advertising and consumerism. However in the last two chapters it is the art market itself that shows a cultural change in thinking by assigning value to the artist as a brand.

For Donald Kuspit, this is now a world dominated by dollars and zeros. He notes:

“Winning in the market means the work is a good bet not a good product? Commercial recognition and critical recognition have become interchangeable. A high price for Damien Hirst is more scandalous than a good review. It is more provocative than the work itself.”16

The overall objective of this research is one of exploring relationships between branding and art, with the bonus of revealing cultural changes towards consumer identity value and exchange. An exchange, which must be noted exists predominately within a time frame after the Second World War. This merging between art and cultural values reveals as much about the changes in art as about us over this period. For branding, as explained throughout this research, depends on its ability to be received and read as a language of consumer culture, delivered by and large from advertising and media.

The authors of The Advertised Mind, Hollis and Brown, state, ‘the real understanding of brand is in finding the core or the initial reaction, whether that be a childhood memory, the desire for status or even the fact they liked the brand’s advertising, without being misled by people’s desire to appear rational’.17

15 Kuspit Donald, The End of Art, University, 2004, p.87-88 16 Ibid, p.88 17 Plessis, Du Erik, The Advertised Mind, 2005, p.12 11

In the art world there has also been a desire to understand and reveal meaning behind a consumer culture and brands, by way of artists such as Claus Oldenberg, Jeff Koons, Andreas Gursky, Barbara Kruger and Tom Sachs. , art critic theorist and author, notes Marx argued that production and consumption were bound up with one another to the point of identity. Not only does one depend upon and complete the other, but also in production is found consumption.18 Stallabrass says the exclusive focus on consumption in much of the art world is an ideological matter that flows from the prominence of advertising and other corporate and therefore the less that is thought about production the better. 19

In a commodity market, whether it is artists or museums, production and consumption are not far from anyone’s mind. It would seem reasonable to ascertain that if museums emerged to and display the cultural artifacts of each generation, then the new world of brand and materialistic lifestyle would also become a means to both support and reflect this current culture.

James Twitchell refers to the museum, now a long-standing bastion of culture, as “Museumworld”. Twitchell says shows such as that at the in in 2002-2003 titled “Shopping – A Century of Art and Consumer Culture”, were not to be viewed as tongue-in- cheek. It was the Tate’s way of showing that buying stuff, has been an essential part of urban life throughout the twentieth century and that, because of it, Museumworld itself has been transformed.20

Twitchell sees Museumworld’s new role as one of entertainer, a promoter of the world of arts under the big tent of culture – it’s about putting on a show. Increasingly, exhibitions create environments that will intentionally evoke a sensation or emotional response. They are subscribing to an old showbiz phrase, “the only flop is a show no one talks about”.

More and more, museums and galleries rely on cross-promotion and branding to stage and display local and international exhibitions. The merchandise that supports these shows is now almost as important as the work exhibited. If you pay a visit to any current museum or blockbuster show around the world it becomes apparent the importance of

18 Grunenberg Christoph, Hollein Max, Shopping. A Century of Art and Consumer Culture. p.90 19 Ibid, p.90 Marx reference : Nicolaus, Martin. Grunrisse Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. p.90-94 20 Twitchell, B. James, Branded Nation The Marketing of Megachurch, 2004, p. 245 12

merchandise in the overall marketing strategy of the exhibition. For museums marketing and branding has become more than just a means of selling products – it has now become a business tool of survival and profit.

Such is the concern of maintaining brand market profiles and awareness in 2001 the Australian Arts Council elicited the help of the advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi, to undertake a phone survey on the state of the arts. From the questionnaire a book was compiled entitled “Australians and the Arts”21. Peter Timms, author of “What’s Wrong with Contemporary Art?” says:

Having spent a great deal of tax payers’, money compiling this document, the Australia Council then set up a twenty three member committee to implement its recommendations, which essentially boil down to the arts needing to be ‘rebranded’. With its simplistic, functionalist emphasis on making the arts enjoyable for all, the report has no doubt also encouraged newspaper editors to give over more of their arts pages to personality profiles and other promotional material at the expense of criticism and discussion.22

The response of public museums to declining attendances has been to offer more of the same: more progressive marketing and more populist programming. The director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Gerard Vaughan, claims that gift shops, wine bars, interactive touch – screens and restaurants ‘make easier and more enjoyable the core process of engaging with great works of art’.23

It is of no surprise that this direction is being undertaken by museums today for self preservation, as progressively more people turn to the internet, pay TV and technology to get their cultural stimuli. This is becoming the age of reality TV and web cam, where every act and thought can be witnessed and played out in front of millions of viewers.

Branding infiltrates many levels of Western society and is constantly generating new markets, such as developing countries. In the book, “No Logo”, Naomi Klein24 speaks of the infiltration of branding into the fabric of our lives, addressing the monopoly of corporate branding. Through her book Klein exposed branding in schools and the sweatshops of Asia

21 Timms, Peter. What’s Wrong with Contemporary Art, UNSW, 2004, p. 42-43 22 Ibid, p.44-45 23 Ibid, p.44-45 (Original Source ‘The Australian’ ‘Would you like Art with that?’ 1 November 2002, p.15) 24 Klein, Naomi. No Logo, Flamingo, London. 2000, 2001 13

with money trails that ran back to America and high profile brands such as Nike and Gap. Klein has not been alone in her concern of branding on culture, and many authors such as George Ritzer, Irving Sandler, Mark Gobe, Kalle Lasn, Grant McCracken, and Albert Muniz have also tackled the subject of consumerism. Equally on the art side, philosophers have been debating since the turn of the twentieth century on what constitutes art and its value in consumer culture. Jean Baudrillard, Richard Wollheim, Arthur C Danto, Jaques Derrida, George Dickie and Guy Debord, just to name a few.

Within Klein’s book, the reader was continually asked to consider their position in regard to the power of the brand. Within this paper the question is also asked with the added complexity of art and cultural values entwined. For me brands do more than just question the monetary values assigned to artworks, cars, houses, or Gucci bag. They highlight the human capacity to assign the world of form an internal measure of value, which as discussed throughout this paper is influentially informed by media and advertising through a complex system of signs and symbols. From my research and understanding this is a system of conversion, as in abstracting the world to a consumer value, such as branding. It could be said though, as a counter measure to this, art’s role is one of converting it back to a universal language that expresses the human condition.

Baudrillard speaks of the consumer being held by a market that creates uncertainty, he sees us in a jungle of fetish – objects which he notes, have no value in themselves, or rather have so much value cannot be exchanged. Branding for Baudrillard are simulations of the world delivered through signs, whose objective is one of making reality disappear by masking the event. For him art and media follow suit and as such are destined to the same fate.25 What he doesn’t allow for is the fetish of a consumer culture whose meaning and value is relative to the time it reflects, now. This of course will not always be the case, for when we change, art and values change. For brands or art are inherently the values we hold within ourselves, invested into the cultures we create and inhabit and as such with time will both change and evolve.

25 Baudrillard Jean, Connspiracy of Art, Columbia University, 2005, p.100 14

CHAPTER 1: ME MY ART BRANDS AND SELF

Distilling a complex subject such as branding into an art form that can be touched or viewed in an objective way requires understanding the components of artistic consumer . What makes branding such a powerful tool of exchange in the commerce of Capitalism today? Do brand labels, promises and privileges offered by the organization make consumers connect to branded products, artifacts, celebrities, football clubs, ideology and companies? Or is it at a much deeper emotional level where value is a lot harder to translate into dollars and cents. It is a type of brand alchemy where it becomes something more than a masthead, and converts into an object of social standing to be fused with the identity of the owner.

Capitalism, by its very nature nurtures the attitude of a branded identity. From the moment a child takes its steps into the western market, evaluation of identity is present. This includes the street, town, state, and country where you live, places and names of educators, every aspect of your clothing and accessories, cars, where you eat and who you associate with. Whether we see ourselves in a branded sense or not – western culture does. Branding as a cognitive behaviour has become so imbedded in the psyche of people that evaluation of their own and other identities have become guided by it.

What drives investors and collectors in art today has to be seen as more than buying a taxidermy shark in a vitrine. It is about investing in the brand identity of the artist who made it. This is an identity created not through the usual marketing guidelines of registering a brand name company and logo, but a brand identity created by association with established branded dealers, museums, auction houses and collectors, who hold influence and weight within the art world.

Individuals chosen to represent such weight and influence within this thesis include the artists Damien Hirst, , Jeff Koons and Tracy Emin, plus dealers such as and New York super dealer Larry Gagosian. Key figures such as these act as a point of discussion, to question values around the brand name of an artist when seen as a celebrity of standing, recognized both inside and out of the art world irrespective of creativity.

For me, brand standing is just that - the position and standing that an artist can hold within the art world as a branded identity.

It should also be noted that this standing in relation to the discussion within this paper refers only to individuals and artists who operate at the highest end of the art and investment

15

market, in a time span already mentioned that occurs largely from the end of the Second World War till the present. This was a period, which saw a new wave of intellectuals, artists and art theorists trying to place the arts in an ever-growing climate of mass media and advertising. The scene was set for the first positive phase of post-modernism after art movements such as Fluxus, Happenings, Conceptual26 and Pop Art.27 Artist, Allan Kaprow, called this the “age of analysis.” 28

My own “analysis” begins by relating the context of my practical work in this field of enquiry. I look to terms applicable such as readymade, repetition, authorship, commodity, identity, symbolism, celebrity, belief, language, sculpture, to see if they apply to my line of enquiry: Is art as a value being created by market forces and speculation such as branding, or does it derive from a much deeper level within us, such as spirituality?

To do this in a visual sense, a narrative must be shown to exist between the artists and players of my theoretical brand equation and the practical show itself. One way of doing this is to show no signs of branding, except contained within the symbolism of the objects themselves. This approach acknowledges earlier artists such as Belgian artist, Marcel Broodthaers, Italian Piero Manzoni, Frenchman Yves Klein, and American counterparts Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth. Their involvement in Conceptual Art highlighted the role of art in a commodity

26 A survey of the art that has been called conceptual, shows that most concerns the perceptible, the imperceptible, and the relation between the perceptible and the imperceptible. Sometimes it is said that conceptual art concerns the relation between concepts and their manifestations. And sometimes it does. Concepts are usually thought of as imperceptible; their manifestations, as perceptible. Three kinds of conceptual art can be distinguished. In the first, the art object is imperceptible but its existence is contingent on its perceptible expression. In the second, the art object is imperceptibleand it has no perceptible expression, but its existence is contingent on its apprehension by some audience. In the third, the art object is imperceptible, it has no perceptible expression and it need not be apprehended by an audience. The first kind of conceptual art, the kind in which the art object is imperceptible but its existence is contingent on its perceptible expression, was the first to be developed. Harry Flynt, who coined the phrase "concept art" in 1962, he wrote:

Concept art is first of all an art of which the material is concepts, as the material of music is sound. From the philosophy of language we learn that a concept may as well be thought of as the "intension of a name."(1)

The philosophy of language to which Flynt refers seems to be that associated with Rudolf Carnap. According to Carnap, most expressions have an extension and an intension. Those objects in the world to which an expression refers is its extension. The meaning of an expression, by virtue of which it refers, is its intension. According to Flynt, conceptual pieces are intensions. Consider an example of what he might mean. Suppose that the intension of "horse" is a conceptual piece on Flynts view. Since the intension of "horse" is an abstractentity, it is imperceptible. But had the word "horse''never been uttered, its intension would have never existed. Thus, the existence of the intension of "horse" is contingent on its perceptible expression. Flynt's views have been embraced in a slightly modified form by the British Art-Language group, and by the American editor of Art- Language, Joseph Kosuth. (a)

(a) Jamieson, Dale. The Importance of being Conceptual. Source: The Journal of aesthetics and art Criticism, Vol. 45, No. 2. Published by Blackwell Publishing, (Winter, 1986), pp.117-123 (1) H. Flynt, "Concept Art," reprinted in R. Kostelanetz (ed.), Esthetic Contemporary (Buffalo, 1978) ,p. 411.

27 Jencks, Charles. The Post modern Reader, Academy Editions, 1992. p.18 28 Kuspit Donald. The End of Art, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p.64 16

market through a cognitive approach. This is akin to advertising and its focus on the idea. The movement poses, “what is art? And asks if it must be a unique and saleable luxury item.

In a 1969 article, ‘Art after Philosophy’ Kosuth29 saw art as an idea, a tautology, which he believed was a different position to that posed by the movement DaDa and Marcel Duchamp. Kosuth believed readymades announced, “I am art because I am art”.30 Broodthaers a contemporary of Kosuth saw art as a tautology slightly different, when he stated:

“What is Art? Ever since the 19th Century the question has been posed incessantly to the artist, to the museum director, and the art lover alike. I doubt in fact that it is possible to give a serious definition of art, unless we examine the question in terms of a constant – I mean the transformation of art into merchandise. This process is accelerated nowadays to the point where artistic and commercial values have become superimposed. If we are concerned with the phenomenon of reification, then art is a particular representation of the phenomenon – a form of tautology. Commentaries on Art are the result of shifts in the economy.31

The subversive nature of advertising could be seen in Marcel Broodthaers’ work ‘Pipe et Formes Academique’ (1969-70). This open and ambiguous work operates by evading definition, which mirrors the act of advertising through its subversive play of symbolism and text.

Broodthaers attempted to signify the place of the object and the value system in which it was held in art institutions and museums. Objects that sit within these walls are subject to the demands of capitalism and consumer goods. American theorist, Buchloh, says of

29 In the 1960’s for the first time, works by living American artists were becoming objects of speculation, like downtown real estate or next year's wheat crop. As a result it seemed that artworks were increasingly valued as investments, rather than as instruments of expression or objects of aesthetic appreciation. Many artists seemed to cooperate with this shift by making pieces that were eminently" collectable"; bland but attractive works that ignored the political and moral frame work in which they were embedded. Kosuth and the Art-Language group responded by distinguishing artworks from their documentations. Because their pieces were concepts rather than perceptible objects, they could not be bought and sold. And what could be exhibited in a gallery or museum was only the documentation of a piece, and not the piece itself. But the collectors, curators, and dealers were unmoved by these metaphysical distinctions. They bought and sold documentations as if they were the pieces, which they documented; and increasingly, with the collaboration of the artists concerned. Where once there had been the fetishism of the artwork, now there was the fetishism of the documentation. For all intents and purposes, everything remained the same. (a)

(a) Jamieson, Dale. The Importance of being Conceptual. Source: The Journal of aesthetics and art Criticism, Vol. 45, No. 2. Published by Blackwell Publishing, (Winter, 1986), pp.117-123

30 Kuspit Donald. The End of Art, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p.64 31 Buchloh H.D. Broodthaers, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1987, p.35 17

Broodthaers’ figurative work, that we are up against the law of commodities that regulate the forces of fashion, and these are artistic objects framed as mere advertisement, presented in their final form as just another commodity.32 Buchloh asks if this, as in advertising, is an object that disguises its real intent.

Within my own work, exposing advertising and branding’s real intent begins by choosing symbolic objects that are associated with two artists who are already seen as established brands. Both in their own way can be said to have dominated their respective art time and scenes. They are the American artist, Andy Warhol33, who practiced art from the 1960’s - 1980’s and British artist, Damien Hirst, 1980’s till the present. Even though Warhol is deceased, he and Hirst for many (including me) are a major force and influence in the art world. For me, these two artists are exemplifications of the discussion of art to branding, however due to their respective time periods this document must be read mostly within a historical context.

In an advertising driven culture, brands have become expressed through a shorthand of symbols colours patterns and shapes. This allows for easy recognition and cut through in a cluttered landscape of signs, hoardings and . As a way to recognize the persuasive power of brand symbolism, I looked to the associated brand symbolism attached to Warhol and Hirst. In Warhol’s, case it was an object that has become fused with his identity- the Campbell’s soup can (Fig.A). For Hirst a series of dot paintings that could be seen to reflect the market’s appetite for consuming art (Fig.B). These visual shapes may not be easily read

32 Buchloh H.D. Broodthaers, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1987, p.94

33 Andy Warhol, original name Andrew Warhola (b. Aug. 6, 1928, Pittsburgh, Pa., U.S.—d. Feb. 22, 1987, N.Y.) American artist and filmmaker, an initiator and leading exponent of the Pop art movement of the 1960s whose mass-produced art apotheosized the supposed banality of the commercial culture of the United States. Warhol began painting in the late 1950s and received sudden notoriety in 1962, when he exhibited paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and wooden replicas of Brillo soap pad boxes. By 1963 he was mass- producing these purposely, banal images of consumer goods by means of photographic silk screen prints. A process that involved printing endless variations of portraits of celebrities in garish colours. The silk screen technique was ideally suited to Warhol, for the repeated image was reduced to an insipid and dehumanized cultural icon that reflected both the supposed emptiness of American material culture and the artist’s emotional non involvement with the practice of his art. Warhol’s work placed him in the forefront of the emerging Pop art movement in America.

In 1968 Warhol was shot and nearly killed by Valerie Solanas, one of an assemblage of underground film and rock music stars, assorted hangers-on, and social curiosities who frequented his studio, known as . (The incident is depicted in the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol). Throughout the 1970s and until his death he continued to produce prints depicting political and Hollywood celebrities, projects. His Book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol”, (1975) was followed by Portraits of the Seventies and Andy Warhol’s Exposures (both 1979). In his will, the artist dictated that his entire estate be used to create a foundation for “the advancement of the visual arts.” The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts was established in 1987. (a)

(a) Andy Warhol. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Web. Feburary, 2011 18

and understood by the wider public, however they are for the most part read and understood by the art world as the identifiable symbols, representing each artist’s brands respectively.

Choosing to make sculptural works based on symbolic forms was going to take more than simply placing visual symbols adrift within a gallery space to highlight branded artists. For me, these are objects to pose questions on art’s value through re-evaluating the aforementioned brand symbols of the artists into new artworks critical of the term branding. To achieve this, a systematic approach was required to reflect both the artists and the cultural backgrounds they inhabit… repetition.

For Warhol, repetition can be seen in his Soup Can Series (1962). Here were images that ran around the walls of the gallery as if being displayed in a supermarket.34 However Warhol’s intention was not of a critical nature. Instead it showed that he saw repetition as a part of the consumer culture, as each day for twenty years he enjoyed a bowl of Campbell’s Soup for lunch. Repetition as with mass produced products, are now so much a part of the western lifestyle that their removal would immediately alter the consumable landscape and the means by which they are sold - advertising and marketing.

Taking the above statements into consideration, the installation is attempting to make direct reference to the artist as a brand. To assist with this, I looked to the use of name titles, which could bring together the complexity of branding commerce and advertising, with the symbolism of the artists. These titles would have to hold dual meanings referencing both art and advertising such as Brand Standing, Brand Icons, Brand Belief, Brand Identity, Brand Signature, Brand Weight, Brand Language, and finally Brand Culture.

Artists, post Second World War, were now starting to see the world differently, they began reading and understanding the signs of advertising and branding. This in turn led to artists incorporating the subversive nature held within advertising concepts into their own art practices. Art as with advertising was becoming more about layering and stories, where the true intent and meaning of the work could be coded within it.35

For my show an installation was also presented with hidden meaning and signifiers, available to anyone who could decipher the codes held within it. This for me was at least a way, to visually address and persuasion within branding and advertising.

34 Buchloh H.D. Broodthaers. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1987, p.506 35 Buskirk Martha. The Contigent Object of Contemporary Art, Massachusetts, 2003, p.154-155 19

In reality, not many artists can claim to be a branded artist and as such, a void exists between the base and brand summit of western artists. The effects of this can be seen today in the monetary void that now exists in the evaluation of the visual arts. This was not, however, the first time art and artists have been subject to the fashion of money and power. If we look back just a few centuries to the Renaissance we see a shift in the position and status of the artist in the eyes of those who wielded cultural, economic and religious power.

In the book, ‘Artistic Theory in Italy’, we hear from the theorist Moshe Barasch on the changes occurring to the Renaissance artist as they moved from fringes of artistic standing to one that held centre stage:

Fifteenth century painters did not want to produce their works for the ‘ignorants’, for the tasteless, uneducated crowd. Most of medieval art, we remember, was meant to appeal to the broadest possible public. In the Renaissance this trend was reversed, artists frequently aimed at a limited audience of learned, sophisticated spectators. Such spectators, the artists hoped, would grasp the complex subject matter, perceive the subtle ideas concealed – rather than paraded – in a painting, and appreciate the refined formal values.36

This did not mean the artist had now become the director of their creative world. Money speaks and it was not the artist who was speaking with it. Mary Hollingsworth, in her book, ‘Patronage in Renaissance Italy’, tells us it was the patron, not the artist, who was the initiator of artistic endeavours such as architecture, painting and sculpture in Renaissance Italy. These weren’t just fifteenth century patrons playing the role of passive connoisseurs; these were active consumers who had a significant input into determining form and content of the artistic project. Hollingsworth makes us aware that conspicuous expenditure was the principal element in the display of status in fifteenth century Europe and painting and sculpture were seen as tools in achieving a public image of wealth and power. These were Renaissance Patrons who knew the value of the arts as propaganda.37

As the century moved on, attitudes to the input of artists started to change. Scholars such as Leon Batistta Alberti (1404-1472) looked back to the literature of Ancient Greece and Rome to reveal new attitudes to art and artists. Alberti even wrote a treatise to encourage patrons to adopt the architectural language of antiquity. Patrons started to see painting and sculpture for its aesthetic qualities, artists as creators and the patron now with the ability to recognise

36 Blunt, Anthony, Artistic Theory in Italy: 1450-1600.University Press, London, 1962, 1973, p.110 37 Hollingsworth Mary. Patronage in Renaissance Italy, 1994, p.1-3 20

genius within the arts. Employing an artist who had an established name, added status both to the patron and the project they were undertaking. This shift could be seen in 1508 when Michelangelo started painting the Sistine chapel. This was not now just a case of labour tallied against the cost of materials, this was now about the creative and personal talent of the artist creating status for the patron to be displayed for all to see.38

The emerging relationship that developed between the patron and the artist of the fifteenth century saw a shift in the anonymous medieval artesian to one that we would now refer to today as a ‘celebrity artist’. With notoriety came changes for the favourable few and multiple lucrative commissions expanding the studio into a workshop of production. If we compare this to a present day celebrity artists such as Warhol, Hirst39 or Jeff Koons we see correlations between them and the Renaissance. The main difference between then and now was that artists were usually employed in guilds as craftsmen with specialised skills to complete a specialised task for a set wage. Today artists such as Hirst, Warhol and Koons are commissioned more for their names than say their artesian and craftsman skills. We don’t look at artists today as we did in the fifteenth century, who had extraordinary abilities and skills, we see them more as creative director who employs the required skilled artisans to complete their ideas to a set specification.40

38 Hollingsworth Mary. Patronage in Renaissance Italy, 1994, p.7-8

39 Damien Hirst, in full Damien Steven Hirst (b. June 7, 1965, Bristol, Eng.), British assemblagist and conceptual artist, whose deliberately provocative art addresses vanities and beauty, death and rebirth, and medicine, technology, and mortality, considered an enfant terrible of the 1990s art world, Hirst presented dead animals in formaldehyde as art. Like the French artist Marcel Duchamp, Hirst employed ready-made objects to a shocking effect, and in the process he questioned the very nature of art. In 1995 he won ’s , Great Britain’s premier award for contemporary art.

Away from the Flock, Divided, steel, glass, silicone sealants, … [Credit: Justin Lane—EPA/Corbis] Hirst grew up in Leeds and moved to London in the early 1980s. He began his artistic life as a painter and assemblagist. From 1986 to 1989 he attended Goldsmiths College in London, and during this time he curated an influential student show, “,” which was attended by the British advertising mogul and art collector Charles Saatchi. The exhibition showcased the work of a group of Hirst’s classmates who later became known as the successful of the 1990s. Hirst’s reputation as both an artist and a provocateur quickly soared. His displays of animals in formaldehyde and his installations complete with live maggots and butterflies were seen as reflections on mortality and the human unwillingness to confront it. Most of his works were given elaborate titles that underscored his general preoccupation with mortality.

Hirst’s later work included paintings made by machines, enlarged ashtrays filled with cigarette butts, and monumental anatomical models of the human torso. His references to other artistic movements and artists were many. The common format of massive glass vitrines, for example, relied on the precedent of minimalism, while his use of found materials and assistants in making the work links him to other artists of the era, such as the American Jeff Koons, who purposefully demystified the role of the artist’s hand. In addition to making art, Hirst wrote books, designed restaurants, collaborated on pop music projects, and experimented with film. (a)

(a) Damien Hirst. Encyclopaedia Britannica Biography. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Web. Februaury, 2011

40 Schneider B. Daniel. Art Forum, Market index, NY, April, 2008, p.310 21

A case in point is Jeff Koons ‘Celebration Series’ (1993) a project that was undertaken because of his brand standing in the investment market. Why? Because investment at this level of art or otherwise needs to be assured of its return, which in art terms means a high profiled name. For such a large project as ‘Celebration Series’ Koons began by renting a loft on lower Broadway in Manhattan to create his own version of a contemporary Renaissance workshop complete with assistants. He also implemented the Renaissance relationship of artist and patron once more, but in reverse, as he was the one who sourced out rich patrons and backers to support his project. These patrons who formed a partnership were Jeffrey Deitch, Anthony d’Offay and Max Hetzler – all dealers. These modern day patrons were different however from their fifteenth century counterparts, for they could not be sure of what their $3 million investment would yield and if, or when, it would be completed. 41

What they could be sure of was Koon’s42 reputation for being a creative director with a relentless desire to produce artworks of flawless execution, a fact that almost brought him and his team of artisans and fabricators undone. This was largely due to the choice of material, which required the ‘Celebration’ series to be fabricated from bulbous and reflective stainless steel. To achieve such a high finish on such an unforgiving surface, Koons required more than seventy staff, with running costs annually of around $500,000 on salaries and overheads alone. To assist in offsetting these large overheads, Koon’s output, as a part of the Celebration series, was sixteen large-scale photo-realist paintings with a price tag of $200,000 each. This unfortunately only made matters worse, for his aim to achieve a high quality control surfaced through a desire to finesse the paintings, once more depleted the money stores required to complete the project.43

41 Schneider B. Daniel. Art Forum, Market index, NY, Apri,l 2008, p.310

42 Jeff Koons, (b. Jan. 21, 1955, York, Pa., U.S.), one of a number of American artists to emerge in the 1980s with an aesthetic devoted to the decade’s pervasive consumer culture. Koons managed to shock the art world with one audacious work after another, from displaying commercial vacuum cleaners and basketballs as his own art to making porcelain reproductions of kitsch objects to showing homemade pornography. After graduating from the Maryland Institute of Art (B.F.A., 1976), Koons moved to New York City, where he sold memberships at the Museum of Modern Art. He later worked as a commodities broker on Wall Street while making art during off- hours. In the early 1980s he began making art full-time. In his early years, Koons characteristically worked in series. To name only a few, a series called The New (1980–83) included commercial vacuum cleaners and floor polishers in vitrine cases; his Equilibrium series (1985) consisted of cast bronze flotation devices and basketballs suspended in fluid; and his Made in Heaven series (1990–91) was a group of erotic paintings and sculptures of Koons and his former wife. Most of the time, Koons eschewed the traditional role of the artist, appropriating his work (i.e., borrowing elements from another artwork), employing commercially fabricated objects, or using objects made by assistants in a workshop. By these means, Koons addressed the implicit hierarchies of material culture by transforming both high and low images into unblemished, glossy objects of porcelain, stainless steel, carved wood, and other materials. His work also exposed how issues of status and power are embedded in everyday objects. (a)

(a) Jeff Koons. Encyclopaedia Britannica Biography. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Web. February, 2011 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/761332/Jeff-Koons.

43 Schneider B. Daniel. Art Forum, Market index, NY, Apri, l 2008, p.310 22

This relentless drive for perfection in the end was to dry up Koon’s funding, so by the late 1990’s he had drastically reduced his studio staff, from seventy down to two. None of this artistic drama, however, impacted his branded profile as an art superstar within the art world. To the contrary, his work continued to maintain high auction prices throughout his making of the Celebration series, so much so that, after 1999, his works were estimated to be valued in the millions. Seeing that the market still held him favourably, Koons began to take steps to get back on track. The first was representation once more by the Sonnabend Gallery, the other receiving financial assistance from the dealer Larry Gagosian to complete his Celebration series. Seeking assistance in salvaging this project was a smart move on Koon’s part, but it did however come with a stipulation that at auction all selling rights belonged to Gagosian.44

For Gagosian to have a financial intervention into Koons’ project by claiming selling rights meant, from a business perspective, that Gagosian believed he was backing a sound investment. His instincts proved right, for when the Celebration series 1994 was put up for public auction in November 2007, it set the record for the most money paid for any living artist at that time. Works such as ‘Diamond Blue’ (Fig.C) (1994-2005), which sold at Christies for $11.8 million doubled the highest price ever paid for a Koons, or ‘Hanging Heart’ (1994-2006) which went the following night at Sotheby’s for $23.6 million (Fig.D) vindicated Gagosian’s faith in the project. What made this auction memorable however was not the prices achieved (even though astonishing) but the name of the person who purchased them. Daniel B Schneider, writing for Art Forum, says both “Diamond Blue” and “Hanging Heart” were purchased by none other than the dealer, Larry Gagosian, the very man who had been instrumental in seeing that the Celebration pieces had been completed and brought to the market in the first place.45

Gagosian’s intervention in this auction shows a fundamental shift in the way gatekeepers could be now seen to operate within the arts. He has shown, for some galleries and dealers at least, manipulating and inflating art market prices could be now seen as an acceptable practice to benefit the few. Joe Scanlan, Associate Professor at Yale University, says:

One has to wonder how illuminating discussions of artists and money can be when they are almost always limited to superlative cases like Damien Hirst and Takashi Murkami and Jeff Koons – limited that is, to whatever artworks accrue

44 Schneider B. Daniel. Art Forum, Market index, NY, April 2008, p.310 45 Ibid, p.310 23

the most zeroes in the pre-production, post-auction universe. These artists, like Microsoft, are what an economist would call mature companies in established markets, meaning that everything that might be dynamic about them, and the effect that dynamism had on the market, has already happened. The bulk of their efforts are now dedicated to protecting their brands and inserting them into all available markets, from key chains to plaza sculptures. As in art, in economics the perpetual discovery and implementation of new materials, new technologies, and new business strategies – the sum effect of which Austria-born economist, Joseph Schumpeter termed “creative destruction”.46

Seeing the artworld as Scanlan does may seem severe, but is also easy to understand if considered against Koon’s and his ‘Celebration Series’. For me, they are views to underpin the sculptural representation of my work, as in the show’s title piece and namesake “Brand Standing”. The largest of all the works, “Brand Standing” dominates the space in which it sits, through the shape of a giant question mark (Fig. 1A-1L). The largest section, the body was made from casting Warhol’s soup can in plaster, (mentioned earlier) in a process that was repeated some 800 times to obtain the required question mark shape.

The Warhol can sits at the centre of an enquiry between the artist, auctioneers, dealers and the persuasive power of the secondary markets to manipulate value by associated brand status. Names such as Gagosian and Koons discussed already, whose brand prominence is as much to do with the prices they achieve in auction houses, as with the work they sell and make. As a reference to this point, in my work titled “Brand Standing”, the soup can underwent a secondary transformation through the addition of a cast plaster handles. This combo of can and handle was, for me, more than a repetitive casting of Warhol’s can and brand, it was now a symbolic referencing of art’s secondary market in the shape of an auction hammer (Fig.2). A market whose function has become so dependent on the speculative whims of fashion that it could be said art’s monetary value now balances on a pedestal of questionable standing.

A standing that in consumer culture, which for me, in regard to the artist, becomes a balancing act of monetary and spiritual values, expressed through the second part of the question mark - the dot. Sitting at the very entrance of the gallery, the dot requires every visitor to traverse its circular shape before entering. As they pass they are presented with a

46 Scanlan Joe. Artforum International, Art and its Markets, NY, April 2008, p.314 24

figure with outstretched limbs contained within it. This figure is one half of the drawing created by Renaissance master, Leonardo Da Vinci47, titled ‘Vitruvian Man’ (Fig.E).

Why choose Leonardo’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ in the first place? There were two reasons, firstly the brand iconic status both he and the drawing now hold; and secondly, the period of its creation ‘the Renaissance’. This was a time (at least in regard to the church) where art could be seen as a tool of persuasion. This for me was also an image that could be used to represent a measure that was both physical and spiritual in nature pertaining to the human condition. The name comes from the Roman Architect, Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Polio) who created a mathematical formula using the human figure as the basis of its proportion. These proportions were then translated by Leonardo into an iconic drawing that showed the human figure as a point of measure, capable of dividing into both nature and ourselves. Vitruvius describes some of the formula here from the book, De Achitectura, The Planning of Temples, book 3, chapter 1:

47 Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). Florentine artist, scientist, and thinker, the most versatile genius of the Italian Renaissance. He was born in or near the small town of Vinci, a day's journey from Florence, the illegitimate son of a notary and a peasant girl. In 1472 he was enrolled as a painter in the fraternity of St Luke in Florence, after serving an apprenticeship with Verrocchio. Vasari attributed to Leonardo one of the angels in Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ (c.1470, Uffizi, Florence), and the head of the angel on the left of the picture does indeed far surpass its companion in spirituality and beauty of technique, giving the first demonstration of the combined languor and intensity that is so characteristic of Leonardo's work. Verrocchio is said to have been so impressed, that he gave up painting to concentrate on sculpture, and it is possible that he was content to entrust the painting side of his business to Leonardo, who was still living in his master's house in 1476. Leonardo remained in Florence until about 1482, when he settled in Milan. Several pictures are reasonably attributed to the period before this move, among them an exquisite Annunciation (c.1473, Uffizi), usually regarded as his earliest surviving independent painting, and a portrait of Ginevra de' Benci (NG, Washington), probably painted c.1476 for the Venetian ambassador Bernardo Bembo. The most important work of the period is an altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi (Uffizi), commissioned in 1481 by the monks of S. Donato a Scopeto near Florence and left unfinished when Leonardo moved to Milan. This painting and the numerous preparatory drawings for it show the astonishing fecundity of his mind. The range of gesture and expression was unprecedented, and such features as the contrasting figures of wise old sage and beautiful youth who stand at either side of the painting, and the rearing horses in the background, became permanent obsessions in his work.

Leonardo lived in Milan until 1499 (when the city was captured by French invaders), working mainly at the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza (Il Moro). He is said to have been initially recommended as a musician (he was a virtuoso performer on the lira da braccio, an instrument somewhat like a large viola), and in a letter to the duke listing his accomplishments he gives some idea of his versatility, writing of himself first and foremost as a designer of instruments of war and adding his attainments as an artist almost as an afterthought. This many- sidedness comes out in his notebooks, which are filled with technological schemes and investigations of all kinds into the natural world; Kenneth Clark called him ‘the most relentlessly curious man in history’. The price he paid for his versatility was a tendency to leave tasks uncompleted, as his restless mind wandered to some new venture; as Vasari wrote, he ‘could have profited more if he had not been so changeable and unstable, for he was able to study many things, but as soon as he had started, he abandoned them’. Although he surpassed all of his contemporaries in the sheer beauty of his technique as a painter, this ‘mechanical’ aspect of his work was much less appealing to him than solving problems of composition and characterization in his drawings, of which there is a wonderful collection at Windsor Castle (he was the greatest and most prolific draughtsman of his time, using chalk, ink, and metalpoint with equal skill). His dilatoriness dismayed his patrons and he left a high proportion of his pictures unfinished. This stress on the intellectual aspects of painting was one of the most momentous features of Leonardo's career, for he was largely responsible for establishing the idea of the artist as a creative thinker, not simply a skilled craftsman. (a)

(a) Chilvers, Ian. "Leonardo da Vinci." The Concise Dictionary of Art and Artists. 2003. Encyclopedia.com. February 10, 2011). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O3-LeonardodaVinci.html

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For nature has so planned the human body that the face from the chin to the top of the forehead and the roots of the hair is a tenth part; also the palm of the hand from the wrist to the top of the middle finger is as much; the head from the chin to the crown, an eighth part, from the top of the breast with the bottom of the neck to the roots of the hair, a sixth part; from the middle of the breast to the crown, a fourth part; a third part of the height of the face is from the bottom of the chin to the bottom of the nostrils; the nose from the bottom of the nostrils to the line between the brows, as much; from that line to the roots of the hair, the forehead is given as the third part. The foot is a sixth of the height of the body, the cubit a quarter, the breast also a quarter. The other limbs also have their own proportionate measurement. By using these measurements, ancient painters and famous sculptors have attained great and unbounded distinction.48

This mathematical figure, splayed out across the floor, however, poses more than just a formula for the human proportions. In my version of ‘Vitruvian Man’ the form is empty, a silhouetted figure whose definition is dependent on the materials and circle that binds him. To achieve this sculpturally a change of materials was required, in place of the plaster cans we now see matchsticks (Fig.3a-3i). From a tactile approach, the medium of matchsticks is quite different from plaster. Another difference was the requirement that each stick needed to be placed individually. Through this process matchsticks can be seen as more than just a way to present an outline of the human form. They present a visual abstract for the human condition of identity, which forms through layering and time. One that says, unlike Leonardo’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ not everything pertained to the human form is measurable. Some conditions such as desire, status, and taste, are as intangible and immeasurable as the aesthetic and value of art, onto which they are assigned. Another aspect they bring to the dialogue of the exhibited work is the readymade and Duchamp, mentioned in the opening passages of the introduction. This is a conversation that has been ongoing since the start of the twentieth century, involving the artist Marcel Duchamp and the question he posed on art’s value through his readymade porcelain urinal.

An example of one such discussion involved Martha Buskirk, author and art writer who comments on the object in contemporary art and the importance of authorship, in regard to the readymade:

48 Grief, Chuck. Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, Book 3, Chapter 1, The Project Gutenberg, Ebook of ten books on architecture, by Vitruvius, Ebook #20239, www.gutenberg.org, 2006 26

“The readymade provides the starting point for a broader consideration of how inherently multiple forms and methods have been assimilated into a realm predicated on sharply limited production. One achievement of manufacturing has been the potential to create theoretically limitless numbers of identical, and therefore relatively inexpensive, products. With this potential comes the need to prevent unauthorised duplication of certain types of commodities, largely through external limits such as copyright, trademark and patent legislation. When materials or techniques derived from mass production are taken up by artists, the demands of the art market mean that inherent multiplicity has to be re-aligned in accordance with conventions that restrict production - the most common of which is the limited edition. The various ways in which contemporary artists have taken up and refashioned the readymade, however, also speak to the complex layering of reference and quotation that characterises contemporary art”.49

Buskirk sees authorship of an artwork as branding to the context of its reception. This may include non-art sources, along with how it is reproduced and referenced to both other works of art and the history of art, without actually relying on their techniques or materials.50 This echoes the philosophy of Pierre Bourdieu, who spoke of reading a work of art as a process of consumption, a case of decoding, deciphering and communication, which is knowledge only available to someone who possesses the cultural competence or code of appreciation held within the aesthetic logic of the work.51

Bourdieu shares Duchamp’s approach of questioning art’s role and value when read as an object of commodity; they do not, however, question value through an artist’s brand name and fame. For once established an artist’s brand name holds a market value and becomes what Scanlan referred to earlier as a mature established brand. He suggests that going forward, artists in a branded culture may have to offset the business of art by taking more of a counter approach. One that is more conceptual in intent and breaks free from the factory production mentality. The only hitch to this proposal is that the artist must be recognized and elevated within the art world already. An example of this is the deceased American artist, Sol LeWitt, who created a wall drawing series that could be undertaken by anyone anywhere

49 Buskirk Martha. The Contigent Object of Contemporary Art, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2003. p.64-65 50 Ibid, p.64-65 51 Bourdieu Pierre, Distinction A social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Harvard, 1984, p.2 27

without the artist present, from scale drawings he provided, or with his passing, by who ever possesses the copyright (Fig.F).52

The beauty to this approach is that LeWitt’ drawings can be made simultaneously and repeatedly without being subject to degradation of quality and without LeWitt being present. Scanlan says:

For a long time (and still), artists made money from their art by having its value understood as an object to be possessed, usually in exchange for money. Thereafter, both the cash and the artwork are subject to their respective markets, the vagaries of history, and either an increase or decrease in value. LeWitt’s wall drawings forestall this linear fate by shattering the irreversible moment of exchange.53

Scanlan sees that this is a shift in the valuing of an artwork, even though we cannot be sure that LeWitt’s guiding principle still wasn’t distribution and profit margin when he comments:

His instinct for how an artwork might ‘be’ in the world embodies a fundamental shift in how and where we assign value. Like the best aspects of the Internet economy, LeWitt’s starburst Wall Drawing #273: Lines to points on a grid, (1975) collects and makes sense of diverse points in space without privileging any of them, creating value (and income) out of the relations between things rather than out of the things themselves.54

For Scanlan, every artist has to find the balance between the making of art and money as they journey on their artistic road. Some are motivated by just money, others as a tool to generate new work. Make no mistake, says Scanlan, every artist wants to make loads of money for no other reason than because nothing is more affirming than the approval of a market, the market any market.55

Understanding the motives behind an artist’s work does not always match the attributes and opinion of others that have been imposed on them. Scanlan believes, even though he doesn’t speak for everyone, that a large demographic he represents see the most misleading motives attributed to artists as the critiques or authorship of the artwork as a saleable commodity.

52 Scanlan Joe. Artforum International, Art and its Markets, NY, April 2008, p.314 53 Ibid, p.314 54 Ibid, p.314 55 Ibid, p.314 28

These are concepts he says which are interesting for papering over art that could be seen as inexperienced and untruthful. An opinion he sees if viewed by anyone other than a citizen of a liberal capital democracy, as debilitating. According to Scanlan, is essential to the reception and purchase of an artist’s work, whatever form it may take.

Scanlan’s comments touch upon many of the issues related to the context of this research. He finds that LeWitt had counter-acted the usual capitalist exchange associated with an art world by conceptual means being that the assigned value exists in the space between things. In this case, the artist’s conceptual drawing and the wall work. He also finds that for an artwork to be of value, or at least purchasable, it must carry the artist’s name. This is the factor of status due to branding as exemplified in Koon’s Celebration series. For me, an outlook such as Scanlan’s in regard to branding, are proposing opposing views. For to see LeWitt as a circuit breaker of exchange, is to deny the fact that his true value resides not in drawings and concepts but in his place as an established and recognised brand artist of international standing. Museums, galleries and collectors do not invest in a LeWitt wall drawing because it is convenient to carry and store away in a drawer. For a piece of paper without an artist’s recognized signature, authorship, and provenance, is just that, a piece of paper.

Originality is both valued and recognised within the art world, especially in the case of the deceased Sol LeWitt, whose signature is now the only way of verifying authorship in regard to his conceptual ideas such as his wall works. Scanlan believes now that making art in an information economy, the artist has been condemned to a state of purity, or poverty, through the subject of class struggle. A class, which could be said in art’s case, begins with dealers and auction houses bestowing weight and standing on the artist as a bankable brand. This poses the question is art providing cultural enlightenment or a way to create class distinction through the brands they own and display?56

Branded art and products are used by the affluent today, as they were by the Catholic Church and patrons of fifteenth century Rome, to impose a position of authority, hidden within the guises of brand insignias. It is not surprising that today insignia’s in the hand of advertisers have become a lot more than just a simple brand mark. They are, as the Church has shown, a way to build and sustain a congregation of followers.

However to build and sustain a brand congregation of consumers requires a lot of work and money, as any owner of a large corporate brand label would reiterate. To begin with,

56 Scanlan Joe. Artforum International, Art and its Markets, NY, April 2008, p.313-319 29

advertisers need to identify and divide consumers into demographic classes, or pigeon holing them, as anyone who has worked in an advertising agency can tell you (including myself - having worked as a Senior Art Director for a number of years in multinational advertising agencies such as Euro RSCG, Pemberton, Y&R, George Patterson Bates and JWT). These differences may be gender, income, location or religion, which explains why brands have become so important to advertisers to create a place of common ground. Art is no different, just another demographic, just another commodity, classified by the need for class, status, value, function and exchange. So how do you in an artistic sense express a complex subject as this shared by all on a common ground of brands? One of the ways already discussed in the central work ‘Brand Standing’ was evaluating the worth of an artist’s name in the market by questioning it as a symbol of monetary value. Another is in the piece ‘Brand Belief’ which attempts to address classification, through status and worth dependant on the viewer’s own beliefs and values (Fig.4a-4h).

In ‘Brand Belief’ we again find the piece constructed from Warhol’s plaster cans, however this time they are found on the wall instead of the floor. Presented horizontally, the work contains 21 plaster cans that appear to float through the assistance of wooden supports top and bottom, which are held in place by two equal lengths of dowel. The wooden support serves a dual purpose, allowing the can to be turned freely while securing it to a black circular disk, which is attached to the wall. This however is more than a spinning can. For me, it represents an object of faith, a prayer wheel to be used in the ritualistic act of brand consumer devotion. For in the prayer wheel, be it in my version or in an original, we find the requisite of the human condition for sustaining faith in religions and branding alike - Belief. The prayer wheel has its origins in the now deposed region of Buddhist Tibet. Made from copper usually 6 inches high and ornamented with bosses containing turquoises, it can, as my work shows, be supported by an apparatus or held within the hand. The function of a prayer wheel is to chant from texts of sacred scrolls contained within and on the wheel as explained by A R Wright, author of Folklore Tibetan Prayer Wheels:

On removing the lid of the inner cylinder, a tightly packed mass of scrolls is visible, which is rotated when the axle is twirled. Seeing a prayer is thought to be as good as saying it, and passing it before one as good as seeing it (even if it is out of sight in a revolving prayer-wheel). The prayer scrolls are usually covered with numberless repetitions of the sacred formula Om/mani dddmekm! (Om! the jewel in the Lotus! Hm!), which is expected to free the user from the pains and discomforts of a rebirth after the present life, and to end the illusion of existence. Almost invariably the scrolls contain only repetitions of a single prayer to a

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single deity, in some example the scrolls are filled with invocations to four deities, the white, black, yellow, and green gods, who control the powers of evil at the four cardinal points. The mantra or formula appropriate to the contained prayers must be repeated before a wheel is turned, and also at the end of the rotation, or else no merit will be gained. The mantra should also be repeated as often as possible while the turning is going on, and the faster the turning the greater the merit. It is also necessary that the wheel shall be turned only in the direction in which a person would go keeping his right side always to the axle. To turn in the reverse direction is to undo all that has been previously done. 57

James Twitchell, in the book “Branded Nation,” points out that from a religious standpoint acquiring and keeping the faithful is as competitive as any other product in the marketplace. So much so that Oxford University Press publishes a two-volume 800-page book every other year titled “A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World”. This is for the simple reason that the world now contains some 10,000 religions with another two added each year. Within each religion, says Twitchell, is a sacred text, which carries the brand belief system codified allowing for it to be continually passed on. He remarks:58

“Once we realise that magical thinking is at the heart of both religion and branding, it will become clear why. They can momentarily merge. Branding fetishizes objects in exactly the same manner that religion does: it “charms” objects, giving them an aura of added value.”59

Views such as this by Twitchell towards an object being imbued with magic and value were well understood in fifteenth century Rome. The Popes knew the power of imagery and objects to be used as weapons of devotional belief in the battle for souls. They had at their disposal extraordinary and gifted artisans who made their task not only easier but also incredibly effective. Even today a visit to Italy and Rome demands a visit to these artworks, if only to bear witness to a period and time, when art became a tool of persuasion. In art terms most of the works commissioned in the Renaissance, be it statues, frescoes or architecture, are viewed today as priceless creations of artistic genius. It may be easy to forget that first and foremost they were made as objects of propaganda in keeping the faithful believers.

57 A. R. Wright. Folklore Tibetetan Prayer Wheels, Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 1904, p.332-333 58 Twitchell, B. James. Branded Nation, The Marketing of Megachurch, Simon and Schuster, NY, 2004, p48 59 Ibid, p65 31

The Church of Rome today may not rely on the persuasive power of art anymore but it can still leverage the power of stories in tapping into an individual’s insecurity to maintain levels of belief in it as a brand. This is an ethos and principle adopted and well understood by advertisers today, which brings me back once more to the work ‘Brand Belief’. For to spend and invest huge sums of money on artists such as a Warhol and Hirst, auction houses have had to develop security and belief in them as brands first. This is a faith, delivering salvation not of the spiritual but monetary kind.

Beliefs in religion or branding are more than the object of someone’s devotion, be it gods, art, football clubs, or a piece of exclusive luggage. For me, they are a way for an individual to create an identity. An identity, which at least from an advertiser’s perspective, could be regarded as a consumer’s emotional centre, and as such the focus of their marketing gaze.

Be it a brand, church or product, survival and prosperity depends on individuals believing and buying into their myth. Attach it deeply enough and it becomes inseparable from their own identity, an example of this is those who are willing to die for the sake of their faith. This construct of identity made from aligning and believing in the brand inspired me to incorporate, as noted earlier, one half of the ‘Vitruvian’ man into the piece ‘Brand Standing’. The other half is to be found in the work ‘Brand Identity’ where the outstretched figure of man’s measure, ‘Vitruvian’ man, is shown not a splay as before, but in a Christ-like pose, held by the proportion of a square (Fig.5a-5g).

As with ‘Brand Standing’ the materials for ‘Brand Identity’ consist of matchsticks for the figure and plaster cans for everything else. This work, as with ‘Brand Belief’, is made for viewing on a wall and as before transforms the symbolic shapes of a Warhol can into an object of new meaning-one that begins by converting the shape of the Warhol plaster can into an alphabet of Morse code (Fig.6a-6c). To achieve this visually, the plaster can was required to be split lengthways for a dash, and a cross section of the upper can and lid for the dot. These dots and dashes can be seen to run both vertically and horizontally across the face of the wall, echoing repetitive past minimalist masters such as Donald Judd. The intent of simple can shapes, however, is far more than a minimalist wall decoration, they are a mantra of Morse code, spelling a word that is to be found within the title of the piece ‘Identity’ - if you are versed in the language of Morse code that is (Fig.7).

Language comes in many forms, alphabets, sounds, symbols, gestures, with processes of learning that may involve repetition or, as with children under five, immersion. In ‘Brand Identity’, language is presented in the symbolic shapes of Morse code. This is to imply that

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advertising uses brands as you would a coded message to hide messages of status, taste, and desire. Advertisers have already learnt from the past religious catalogues of devotion that brands and products are just as effective through the stealth language of imagery as they are through text. From my experience in the fields of marketing and advertising, the public are largely unaware of the extent of conditioning and exposure they receive everyday in western culture through the silent cultural language of branded imagery. It can deliver both an open and hidden message simultaneously. The most common advertising applications of this being thin, tall, beautiful female models outwardly selling and promoting brands, while inwardly promoting low self-esteem, also known as negative re-enforcement.

Discerning and reading the language held within my own show devoid of branding, requires also an education in regard to its meanings and visual symbolism of codes, which is why none were provided. For without this knowledge the show can be only engaged at the level of the aesthetic, its value inherent only to the materials and arrangement presented. A case in point is the piece ‘Brand Identity’ that requires the viewer to have some knowledge of art, advertising and Morse code to read its meaning. Without this, you are left with nothing more than arrangement of black painted plaster cans sitting alongside a large square of matchsticks that contains figure of a ghost like man silhouetted within it, which may or may not be considered art. The point being made here is that branding is developed like any other language, through continual exposure and immersion in its culture. Immersion that has required the church, advertisers, or any other organisational body, to spend a great deal of money and effort investing in the persuasive power of stories.

Stories are a way to connect to a person’s identity through cognitive recognition, aligning the values and meanings of an individual to an idea. Gerald Zaltman, Professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School, and author of such books as ‘How Customers Think’ and ‘Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market’, explains the cognitive power of brands and stories when he says:

The meaning of brand resides in the mind of consumers, not in the physical brand itself or in advertising about the brand. Consumers develop coherent stories about brands, and these stories are encoded in their memories. These stories may change owing to actions taken by managers, influenced from other consumers, and, of course, consumer new experiences or reassessments of prior experiences. Consumers often share the same basic story – though with individual variations. A consensus map depicts the essential thoughts and feelings in a story and how they are stitched together in memory. These

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common elements represent the archetypal story of a brand. Marketers can understand these stories by eliciting surface-level and core metaphors from consumers, thereby shining a light into consumer’s unconscious (but essential) thoughts held deep in memory.60

Statements such as this remind us that the perceptions we have of either the world, brands, products or art are firstly created and developed within our own minds and, as such, can change depending on the environment, information and technology to which we subject ourselves.

James B Twitchell, author of Branded Nation, also supports the art of branding through storytelling. He believes that storytelling is the core of culture. He says that when the world was made up primarily of needs (food, shelter, sex), there was little sophistication in narrative. We were told most of our communal stories about such things as ancestry, nationalism, social class, and politics. However, after the industrial revolution with the possibility of massive surpluses in the Western world, needs were effectively met and wants and desires became central. Stories attached themselves to fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) such as soap, thread, patent medicine, canned meats, and a host of other quick consumables.61

Stories are an efficient way of relating and connecting the consumer to the product, for as a species our natural tendency is one of social engagement and interaction. Through the art of storytelling, brands facilitate this process. Examples of the narrative can be seen in icon brands such as Marlboro, who created a mythical cowboy, a symbol of the lost and romanticised American West and the rugged and heroic figure who rode in it. Nike developed the myth and legend of a sport icon, Michael Jordan, into a brand icon called Nike Air. Through simply wearing a pair of Air Jordans, the wearer can make magic happen. Coca-Cola built an empire on the idea that their brand gives you a ticket to a world of endless summers filled with thirst-quenching fun and happiness. Consumers relate to and are happy to buy into stories such as these. The debate begins when the question is posed, ‘are consumers wearing the brand to create an identity, or is the product using them to reinforce its own?’

In upcoming chapters such as living in a branded state of mind, there is a more comprehensive analysis of how stories and brands can become a part of the consumer at a

60 Zaltman, Gerald. How Customers Think, Harvard Business School, Boston, 2003, p.230-231 61 Twitchell, B. James. Branded Nation The Marketing of Megachurch, Simon and Schuster, NY, 2004, p.101 34

more cognitive level. Brand identity for galleries, museums, artists, and products, all rely on power of the stories to create status and value. This, as already mentioned, is implemented by and large by advertisers using the medium of media technology. One brand to be examined further on is the soft drink Coca-Cola, whose image and identity was created in stories sold by media and advertising to become the number one soft drink in the world. Brand identity such as Coke or Warhol, requires at least one common denominator for success, exposure. In proceeding chapters such as Fame, Death, Brands and Auctions, the value of exposure can be witnessed not through Andy Warhol’s extraordinary life, but his death.

One of the things that could be ascertained from this chapter was Warhol’s identity and monetary value as a brand is intrinsically linked to his name. This brings me to the last piece to be discussed in the front room of the gallery, titled “Brand Icons” (Fig.8a-8f). Facing back out into the room, literally, the viewer is presented with the gaze of two large faces, belonging to that of Warhol and Hirst. The idea here was to show, as Warhol had done through his silkscreen portraits, the face of fame (Fig.G). The difference here was not to draw attention to fame’s allure but as symbols of brand iconography for selling art. For me, these faces represent the brand logos of Warhol and Hirst, recognisable commodities within the investment market. Artists such as these are like any other stock and as such are subject to the whims of the market, sliding up and down on a set of reactionary investment scales.

To make a point of this, placed between Warhol and Hirst was a set of abacuses made from the same dots as ‘Brand Identity’ (Fig.9a-9b). There is a difference though, for in the place of a coded language we now see disks of calculation, running across pieces of dowel to represent the unstable nature of art in the investment market. The faces themselves are represented in a street art style of a graphic silhouette, created from a baseboard of matchsticks, which has been lightly covered with a crushing of charcoal fragments (Fig.10a-10b). Charcoal as a medium has been around since the Stone Age, where we can safely say, art carried no iconic names or monetary value. This tells us that just because we understand and value something today in a certain context, it doesn’t mean we will tomorrow. A case in point, art’s standing, value and recognition on the stock exchange as a branded and fashionable item.

In all the pieces discussed so far in the front room and gallery of this show, there has been an insistence from me that to engage in art as branding, you must also participate in the language and stories it sells. In the second room, such views as this continue along with the familiar visual props of Warhol’s cans and Hirst’s dots to engage the research. One immediate difference, however, in a visual sense, is the addition of colour, evident in the first work to be discussed titled “Brand Signature”. Presented in the middle of the floor and space, the work

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is comprised of 400 white plaster Warhol can dots, sitting atop 400 plaster cast polystyrene shaped cups, held vertical through the assistance of 3,200 bamboo skewers (Fig.11a-11d). This elaborate balancing act of a cup on skewers holding what seems to be a white hockey puck, is my way of referencing, at least sculpturally, the spot painting series created by Damien Hirst.

Standing in front of the work while still looking down upon it, we see seven coloured spots that sit eight down from the top and four in from the left. The purposes of these colours are more than to just to please the eye, however. They are to convey the word ‘genius’, which derives from a coded alphabet that was originally created by Hirst (Fig. H). Unlike the code of Morse, this alphabet derives from Hirst’s spot paintings series. Where Hirst’s spot series could be seen as fashionable objects of aesthetic consumption (last count 600), my spots are a commentary on the brand Hirst (Fig.12a-12e). If we believe his market standing, like his fifteenth century counterpart Leonardo Da Vinci, Hirst could be now considered an artistic genius, in marketing at least, that comments on the subversive nature of consumerism culture through works such as his spot paintings.

Julian Stallabrass, in the book, “HIGHARTLITE”, explains the views and meanings he believes the spot series holds when he says:

Hundreds of spin paintings and spot paintings, are made by Hirst’s assistants (the spin paintings are discs onto which paint has been flung while they are spun at high speed; the spot paintings are regular grids of spots, the colours selected from ready-made household paints). Both sets of paintings are collectible items in endlessly variable series not editions but unique works that are nevertheless manifestations of a single idea. While they look a bit like a conventional painting, their value is supposedly conceptual. They are not objects that receive sanction from the artist’s touch but as emanations of the artist’s brain. Yet the only clever thing about either series is their exploitation of the market (which could be read as an implied critique of market mechanisms, but equally well could not be); their value, the reason why Hirst is in a position to mount that exploitation, is entirely to do with celebrity. Some of the titles make a virtue of their very media-informed banality; beautiful, fleshy, spinning, expensive, MTV, painting while others support the Hirst myth: chaotic, psychotic, madman’s, crazy, psychopathic, schizoid, murder, painting. Indeed he says of them that

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they are almost like a logo as an idea of myself as an artist, some sort of sculptural consumerist idea.62

In comments such as the above, are we beginning to see the artist as nothing more than signatory persona, a logo whose brand weight and celebrity status determine value? To consider this, the discussion will now move to the second work in the room titled “Brand Weight”. This work, like all the others in the room, contains colours derived from Hirst’s alphabet, but here it is used to consider the signatory brand weight of artist Koons, Hirst and Warhol, as priceless possessions within the market place (Fig.13a-13b). It is not words however, that the viewer first sees when looking upon this work, it is a wall of ten hanging platforms in which the two on the extreme left are a set of rudimentary scales (Fig.14a-14b). On these scales, again from the left, we see stacks of coloured disks spelling the names Koons, Hirst and Warhol, while the right sits just a singular Warholian plaster can, painted to represent the letter P (using the Hirst coloured alphabet). The rest of the word to which it belongs, ‘POSSESSION’, stretches out across the wall on the eight remaining platforms, each covered by a clear bell glass and supported by chains. Upon these chains are to be found the coloured spots of the second word within the piece - PRICELESS! (Fig.15a-15c). These are the same plaster spots used in the works of Brand Identity, Signature, Icons and Belief. For all of its simple arrangement components and colours, it merely asks, “how do we assign, be it a branded artist or an object, the title of ‘priceless possession’ to anything?”

This question, it could be said, has already been answered, for to place any cultural artifact within a museum means it already has had to be rated as an object of value, such as rarity, age, preconsciousness, uniqueness, along with cultural, social, and political significance. Could it be said that branded contemporary artists already represented in a museum are no different than, say, a precious stone - pass the ‘value test’ and entry granted. Or is it more than that, firstly requiring validation from the investment market, addressed visually in the third and final piece of the second room titled “Brand Language” (Fig.16).

“Brand Language” as a work, attempts to show how advertisers, investors and marketeers can present brand culture through the persuasion of the word. Words that, if they were to be removed from our need to own objects and stuff within consumer culture, show themselves to be not human strengths but weaknesses. Visually this was done by amalgamating existing elements already held within the show such as the abacus and coloured alphabet of Hirst into a device called an abicabet (Fig.17a-17f). An abicabet comprises two parts an abacus and

62 Stallabrass Julian. Highartlite, Oxford University Press, UK, 2006, p28 37

alphabet, to re-enforce my intent of branding being a language. To engage with the abicabet the viewer only needs move slightly off centre, for each one is acting as a vertical separator for the coloured spots of Hirst’s alphabet. These coloured dots or words, as already discussed, present a coded language, which requires decoding, deciphering and communication, only available to someone who possesses the cultural competence or code. If a viewer could read the dots between the abicabets however, they would see words (which read from the left to right) that underpin the acts of consumerism ‘desire’, ‘status’ and ‘taste’.

With an overview of “Brand Language” complete, we now move to the last two components of the show. The first piece to be mentioned carries no title, yet it unifies all the works that have been discussed so far in the second room. Presented as a video projection, this is a work that reflects through a fade sequence, all four hundred spots from the piece “Brand Signature” (Fig.18). Upon this gridded field as in the piece it mirrors, is to be found not only the term ‘genius’, but also the words ‘desire’, ‘status’ and ‘taste’. These words sitting in a row, as acquired from the piece “Brand Language”, present as a slow continual loop of fades, mixed intermittently with the singular coloured letters of the words themselves. This piece is a combination of all three works mentioned so far and re-enforces the message that advertising is as much about the language of signs as it is subversive.

In all the works explained so far, there has been an attempt by me to express the difficulties of evaluating art within a market driven economy. A market, which at the highest end, at least in the art world, is managed by only a small group of players. Along the way there has been the impact of fame, ‘desire’, ‘status’, and ‘taste’, on the primary and secondary markets to create a coded language of money and investment. With this in mind, work was begun on the final piece of the show, a type of consolidation piece, titled “Brand Culture” (Fig.19a-19b). This work like many others in the show, has symbolic and material similarities, as in the coloured plaster spots of Hirst’s alphabet and the matchsticks of works such as “Brand standing” and “Brand Identity”.

Unlike the works discussed so far, which have been found within the two main rooms, “Brand Culture” sits alone in a space beside the second room. It does, however, still take the approach that culture and branding are ritualised stories that require education and immersion to participate. To show this within the work, the room was converted into a small classroom complete with blackboard. Upon this board, which sits against the back wall, is the chalk inscribed symbol of a question mark (Fig.20). This mark in its simple gesture is meant to act as a connector, visually and theoretically back to the title and name sake of the show “Brand Standing”. Where “Brand Standing” looked back to the persuasive power of auction houses,

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“Brand Culture”, looks to the influential and cultural importance of art museum and institutions.

For Don Thompson author of the book “The $12 Million Dollar Stuffed Shark” art museums and collections are an important way for the public to gain understanding in cultural artifacts past and present, which is why he labels them the gatekeepers of the art world. Museums have also become for the public at large (induced in part through extravagant prices and elitism of galleries and auction houses) the preferred place to encounter contemporary art. This is why, for many artists, the museum can be seen as a desirable destination and association for reaching the wider public and gaining brand awareness. As a reference to this, above the blackboard on the back wall sits a row of shapes such as spheres, squares, a milk container and a take away cup all made from matchsticks. They are the artist and the artifact that, through associations of cultural institutions such as museums becomes an object of value to be labelled and consumed (Fig.21). This is reiterated in the final components of the piece, the Hirst alphabet, made from my Warhol plaster cans (whose connotations and meanings have already been explained) strewn in full colour across a fictional classroom floor (Fig.22a- 22b).

Presenting a chapter up front in regard to the rationale of my work, it is my hope that correlations can be made between the theory and visual components of “Brand Standing”. If not, it may become clearer through the upcoming chapters that explore in greater detail the term branding in relation to the arts.

Robert C Morgan from the book “The End of the Art World” sees art in a battle to remain autonomous from being engulfed into the world of fashion and advertising. Magazines such as Art Forum continually blur the lines of making fashion look like art and art look like fashion. Art is promoted as a concept whose aesthetic and spiritual value is tied to money, a value and ideology that emanates from the market place. If anything, Morgan sees investment and investors as keeping art on a neutral stage, as it must, to “guard against the encroachment of spiritual value into the global terrain of speculation and exchange”.63

Statements such as those above may present art as being in the grip of authoritarians, auctioneers, and investors, just another commodity for consumption. That is why it is easy to forget that art is also the language of the human experience, irrespective of time and place that captures and reflects back the age - a reason, maybe, why branding is so prominent both

63 Morgan, C. Robert. The End of the Art World, Allworth Press, New York, 1998, p.33 39

within the culture and arts of today. Maybe a show such as mine delivers no new insight to the condition of a branded art and culture but it does, however, fulfil one of art’s noble objectives, in questioning it. For to even be able to consider an artist in terms of a brand standing is to reveal not so much about the value of art in these times, but ourselves.

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CHAPTER 2: A BRAND NEW AESTHETIC VALUE

To argue the point of where an art object or an artist sits in relation to the terminology of branding is also to examine how artifacts and artists hold a place of value within society.

Does the artwork develop its value within a capitalist market place through institutional scrutiny be it from galleries universities, museums or the media? - and does this in turn raise both the artwork’s standing in monetary value and, even more importantly, raise the profile and standing of the artist who created it?

Is it a case of any profile is better than none at all? As examples of this we need only to look to other areas in the arts such as movies, TV and fashion to see that a great many personalities are as high-profiled for their artistic endeavours as they are for their private and scandalous ones. Is the high end of the arts now a case of being either famous or infamous, when both are desirable if they pertain to a brand identity?

Identity is the key word here. Now, as never before in history, an individual’s identity has been able to evolve into areas of delusion and fantasy through the emergence of the Internet, and sites such as Facebook, My Space, You Tube, and chat rooms. Creating and projecting an image it would seem is now only a keyboard away.

Society in general has been educated and immersed in the practice and acceptance of corporate and retail products, which have and reflect brand identities. So much so that the delusion of mainstream brands have become the embodiment of our cultural ‘identity’.

This is indeed an identity mindset minefield, fed and nurtured by a fraternity of media and advertising, fantasy and persuasion. As consumers it is easy to be uncertain or overwhelmed by this and the many choices that must be made in a sea of objects and information that now flood western markets. There is however an upside, for advertisers and corporations at least, because individuals who are in an uncertain state are more likely to be open and receptive to the persuasive power of brands. Brands are so important to advertisers and companies alike because they understand if a long-term connection can be made, it will be at the very core of a consumer, that being their identity and the values to which they hold. If more consumers understood this they would be more tentative in who or what they chose to align and display across their chests.

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In art branding, it may not be exactly the same as wearing a corporate brand on a T-shirt. It still, however, gets down to issues of value and identity, when the persuasive forces of the market are being driven purely by the name of the artist or artwork, on the basis of their branded profile.

For Neil Cummings, art now navigates a complex world of debt and credit, materials, images and information that circumnavigates the globe. He says:

It is no longer clear where the creation of value, the foundation of political economy, fits into our accelerated exchange of signs, services and information. The theory of value based on the accumulated profit extracted from labour, which emerged in industrial-age economic models and is principally identified with the work of Karl Marx,64 has little or no purchase on the possibilities introduced by immaterial labour. The kinds of ephemeral “products” manufactured by contemporary cultural, entertainment, and creative industries like museums and galleries, or in departments and advertising companies, are difficult to represent. But what is clear is that art is no longer a luxury by-product of financial capital that can transcend political and economic structures; it must be seen as central to these “new” economies.65

Cummings sees art now as not just an encounter with the work through a passive display, but as a place where the artwork can be articulated through engagement and production. For Cummings, art has become nodes along the networks of exchange made possible through cultural criticism and a great debt to the Marxist engagement with culture.66

64 Karl Marx (1818–1883) is best known not as a philosopher but as a revolutionary communist, whose works inspired the foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century. It is hard to think of many who have had as much influence in the creation of the modern world. Trained as a philosopher, Marx turned away from philosophy in his mid-twenties, towards economics and politics. However, in addition to his overtly philosophical early work, his later writings have many points of contact with contemporary philosophical debates, especially in the philosophy of history and the social sciences, and in moral and political philosophy. Historical materialism — Marx's theory of history — is centered around the idea that forms of society rise and fall as they further and then impede the development of human productive power. Marx sees the historical process as proceeding through a necessary series of modes of production, characterized by class struggle, culminating in communism. Marx's economic analysis of capitalism is based on his version of the labour theory of value, and includes the analysis of capitalist profit as the extraction of surplus value from the exploited proletariat. The analysis of history and economics come together in Marx's prediction of the inevitable economic breakdown of capitalism, to be replaced by communism. However Marx refused to speculate in detail about the nature of communism, arguing that it would arise through historical processes, and was not the realisation of a pre-determined moral ideal. (a)

(a) Wolff, Jonathan, "Karl Marx", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Web, (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =

65 Cummings, Neil. A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945, Blackwell Publishing, USA, 2006,p.406 66 Ibid, p.406 42

Marx notes:

The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but the social existence that determines their consciousness.67

Marx saw there was a means of controlling the material production of life and this fell into two broad social classes:

1. The working class or proletariat: Marx characterised this class as individuals who sell their labour but do not own the means of production, and argued that, through their labour and the profit extracted from it, the members of the industrial working class are responsible for creating all the given wealth in society.

2. The middle class or bourgeoisie: those who own the means of production and extract the profit from the labour of the proletariat.68

In his book, “The Intangibilities of Form”, John Roberts believes that Marx implies that the monetary exchange of labour deprives the labourer (he or she) of any control over the labour process. That is to say, the pressures that value forms in production and consumption cannot be separated from the fragmentation and deskilling of labour.69

When this is encapsulated into capitalist production and labour, the mass worker is stripped of his autonomy to be replaced by technology and science. Technical and scientific knowledge has been incorporated into the production process, which Marx refers to as the technical division of labour within a factory, office, or workshop, which differentiates it from the social division of labour.70

Adam Arvidsson sees capital as an embodiment of value. Capital can use different assets such as factories, machinery and goodwill to act as collateral and loans as well as supporting the price of stock. Arvidsson references R Bellofiore (1988), a theorist who talks on Marxism Economics and the logic of capital, which can be defined as value-in-progress. It is a value

67 Cummings, Neil. A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945, (Referenced- Karl, Marx. Info in Bib) Blackwell Publishing, USA, 2006,p.406-407 68 Ibid, p.407 69 Roberts, John. The Intangibilities of Form, Skill and de-skilling in art after the readymade, 2007 p.82 70 Ibid, p.82-83 43

moving from a fluid state of money, into static states of machinery, factories, media, investments and other means of production, which in turn governs and controls the labour process, producing surplus value that is once again converted into money values once more or as the Marxist formula described it, Money – Capital – More Money: Formula M-C-M.71

Marx’s theory and formula bring an aspect to the discussion of art and brand through the value that can be assigned to an art object or brand in today’s current economic climate. A climate where art is not always necessarily sold in the form of an art object, it can be equally just an idea – a characteristic it shares with its cousin, advertising. This may explain why branding has become so influential, for it assists in the selling the product as an idea for consumer consumption. What constitutes the value assigned to art within the market may help to explain the role branding plays.

For Arvidsson, brands act like money – a type of communication in currency. Consumers pay for the privilege to access the communicative potential of the brand, into which they in turn insert their own compatible qualities. The customer is paying to enter into a long-term relationship with a brand beyond its functionality, and into individual assorted products. An example of this is low cost spin offs around the core product, such as in prestige cars like Mercedes Benz, where the cost of the car may be out of range, but T-Shirts, badges and caps are not.72

A division now exists in capitalism between production and valorisation. In industrial capitalism, success was achieved from the workers who made the products then consumed them. There has been a shift since the early days of Henry Ford and the term ‘Fordism’, to the financial markets where a thread to the material production is kept, however this has recently become secondary to the importance of playing the risk market. The risk market involves the privatisation of housing, pensions and social insurance systems. In this environment, brands become a way of anchoring consumers down in a capitalist sea of instability, where identity and community are increasingly devoid of social structure and tradition.73

In marketing speak, brand value equates to brand equity. What sits behind the brand? What assets does it hold in the way of brand names and symbols?

71 Arvidsson, Adam. Brands Meaning and Value in Media Culture, Routledge, USA, 1998, p.125 72 Ibid, p.131 73 Ibid, p.132 44

To understand and better explain how Brand equity functions, Arvidsson refers to the author, D Aaker and his book, “Managing Brand Equity”, which points out there are five key points.

1. Brand loyalty: the existence of a more or less loyal customer base. 2. Name awareness: the extent to which consumers in general are familiar with the brand. 3. Perceived quality: the perception of the overall quality of the brand which is not necessarily based on a knowledge of detailed specifications, but the general idea that people have of the brand. 4. Brand associations: the attitudes or feelings that a brand generates. 5. Other proprietary brand assets: such as patents, trademarks and television channel relationships.74

Segmentation of consumer awareness is key to the understanding of, and equating value to, products or brands for both the business and marketing communities alike. From points like this, surveys and databases are established to measure aspects of branding. These are aspects of branding such as association, loyalty and emotion, and attention – all difficult to equate in regard to brand value. Arvidsson points out there are standard approaches to brand value, such as residual measurement, which equates brand value with the market price of its company, minus its tangible, measurable, asset. There are other approaches, however, such as the inter-brand method, which calculates the operational revenue over the past 3-5 years against an unbranded competitor product, and the revenue it has generated. This can be problematic, as Arvidsson points out, as the number of unbranded products is unknown. For him, the whole measuring of brand values is problematic, and the problem lies in subjective attachments such as attention or effect.75

This however, has not deterred companies in measuring brand value through TV and commercial timeslots. By tracking the type and number of viewers along with their viewing times, a company can valorise its product against the attention given to it by the viewer. Arvidsson sees measuring such as this in relation to brand valuation as a problem of political rather than ontological.76

Equally, Neil Cummings finds valorisation of art problematic. Measuring the intangible in artwork as an object of aesthetic value or simply as just an object of value requires first a change within society towards the aesthetic. Cummings looks to other art theorists on

74 Arvidsson, Adam. Brands Meaning and Value in Media Culture, Routledge, USA, 1998, p.133 75 Ibid, p.134 76 Ibid, p.135 45

tackling the issue of valorisation such as Grant Kester, an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, who sees a shift in attitude towards the aesthetic being led by prominent writers and figures such as Hume, Kant, Schiller, and Shaftesbury. Writers and philosophers such as these show us that we do not have to approach the object just from a viewpoint of self-interest. We can now take a position of enlightened disinterest. It is possible through the aesthetic experience to exchange in both a cognitive and social capacity. We can feel and experience on the most intimate level of our singular selves, without being imposed on from the divine above or the individualism demanded on us by the market. This engagement between the public and aesthetic is highlighted for Kester at the beginning of the 1700s in France. Pressure was being brought to bear on Louis XV by the bourgeois financial elite. Their wish was to open up the bureaucratic and institutional channels of state power to new actors and the identity of French people be formed independently of monarchical will. To date, the public representation had been one of political inclusion and self-interest. However, in the 1730s, there was a consolidation of a salon, which became the ground battle for the commissioning and exhibiting of art along with the rebirth of he French public. This salon, now known as the Louvre, brought together all levels of social class, be it artisan or aristocrat, united (albeit temporarily) under this roof as citizen-viewers, each with his or her singular and equally valid opinion or, as Kester notes from art historian Thomas Crow, a forerunner to future political life and liberalism.77

Immanual Kant’s philosophy on aesthetics in the Enlightenment draws no distinction between natural and artistic beauty.78 An example of such text is presented here from Kant’s ‘Critique of Judgement’:

Nature proved beautiful when it wore the appearance of art: and art can only be termed beautiful where we are conscious of its being art, while yet it has the appearance of nature. Hence the finality in the product of fine art, intentional though it be, must not have the appearance of being intentional: fine art must be clothed with the aspect of nature, although we recognise it to be art. But the way in which a product of art seems like nature is by the presence of perfect exactness in the agreement with rules prescribing how alone the product can be what it is intended to be, but with an absence of laboured effect (without academic form betraying itself) i.e., without a trace appearing of the artist having always had the rule present to him and of its having fettered his mental powers.79

77 Cummings, Neil. A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945, Blackwel Publishing, USA, 2006, p.252-53 78 Danto, Arthur C. After the End of Art. Princeton University, 1997, p.82 79 Kant, Immanual. The Critique of Judgement, translated by James Creed Meredith, 2004, p.45 46

Arthur C Danto sees this philosophy as implying that aesthetic considerations come from the realm of function and utility, justifying the removal of ornament and decoration from architecture, or elimination of the art subsidies from Federal budgets.80 Danto asks us to consider a spark plug. In Kant’s time a spark plug could not have existed, (or even been considered as an artwork if they had existed) due to the metallurgy needed to make them and the fundamental absence of the internal combustion engine. However, let’s say they did, and were discovered in the year of 1790. It would soon be found to serve no purpose and therefore become an object of curiosity and contemplation, maybe even a paperweight. If this were the case, it could then be suited to Kant’s characterisation of beauty as “purposiveness without specific purpose”. 81

In today’s current consumer and contemporary art culture there has been a decided shift to what constitutes aesthetic values. This is due largely to the French artist Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 led a type of aesthetic revolution, albeit not for reasons of beauty. This revolution was centred around one object in particular – a hardware-bought porcelain urinal. This simple factory object would break down barriers long held within the doctrines of art on what defines aesthetic value and art. It allowed for the first time ‘ready-mades’82 such as a urinal or a spark plug to be seen and classified as works of art. Have some time, fame and luck imposed onto the artist, and the banal readymade meta-morphs into a branded one of great value. For Duchamp, there was, an unexpected turn in his revolutionary art. It would seem he did not allow for the capacity built into the human condition to extract aesthetic beauty and value from almost any object presented. Danto notes:

80 Danto, Arthur C. After the End of Art. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1997, p.82 81 Ibid, p.83

82 The effort of philosophers in the 1950s to demonstrate, following Wittgenstein's theory of open concepts, that art could not be defined has not hindered some contemporary aestheticians from making the attempt. At the heart of such discussions, at least in the visual arts, lie Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, which more than any other experiment has challenged the boundaries and even the foundations of art as a concept. In the second decade of this century, Duchamp selected commonplace objects, including a urinal provocatively entitled Fountain, and shook the art world by exhibiting them, often physically unaltered except for the appearance of the artist's signature, on pedestals in museums. After the initial reactions of laughter or disgust, the ready-mades held their status as artworks, usually categorized as sculpture, and since have become the central hurdle over which any attempt to define art must leap. Not only did the readymades find their way into permanent museum collections, but, they solidified their position in the academic history of art by crucially influencing later developments. Without Duchamp's experiments it is likely that the Pop Art celebration of everyday objects or the current profusion of "junk" sculpture might never have occurred. In any case, such vigorous movements have helped theorists perceive the inadequacies of traditional criteriafor art, such as imitation or expression, and have encour- aged them either to abandon definition altogether or pursue it in some other direction. (a)

(a) Goldsmith, Steven. The Readymades of Marcel Duchamp, The Ambiguities of an Aesthetic Revolution, Blackwell Publishing, Source: The Journal of Art and Criticism, Vol. 42. No. 2. (Winter, 1983). pp.197-208

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The readymade objects were seized upon by Duchamp precisely because of their aesthetic nondesriptness and he demonstrated that if they were art but not beautiful, beauty indeed could form no defining attribute of art.83

Shown at the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, the urinal was presented by Duchamp with a false signature under the title of ‘Fountain’. Duchamp’s objective was one of removing the aesthetic value held within an art object. The art world has had quite the opposite response to Duchamp’s intention, finding the urinal not only an object worthy of museum art quality, but also a rare and valuable one with great aesthetic beauty. Even when it was shown, Duchamp’s immediate circle of friends found that it was more than a urinal; it was an object of white, gleaming beauty.84

Duchamp’s intent, regardless of his objectives, has had far-reaching effects on issues of aesthetic and valuation and the role of art within the gallery or museum, as well as public reaction to it. For brand art, his simple act of signing a false name on a readymade highlights value in authorship and the role the artist, gallery, buyer or auction house plays in this.

A great many factors come into play in establishing an artwork’s value or even ultimately an object or idea of brand worthiness. Providence is one such factor in establishing an artwork’s validity and value. To do this requires either a body or individual from a recognised institutional authority within the art world to first legitimise the object or idea as an artwork, and secondly acknowledge it as one deserving of artistic value.

In his book, “What Good are the Arts”, John Carey asks the question, “What is a work of art?” He says:

A work of art is the Primavera and Hamlet and Beethoven’s Fifth, and things of that kind. But the problem, rather, is what is not a work of art? What cannot be? For unless we know what art is not we cannot draw a boundary around what it is. Again you may reply, that’s easy. There are plenty of things that are not works of art – for example human excrement. Although that may sound a convincing answer it would, in fact, be an unfortunate choice. The Italian artist Piero Manzoni, who died in 1963, published an edition of tin cans each containing 30

83 Danto, Arthur C. After the End of Art. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1997, p.84 84 Ibid, p.84 48

grams of his own excrement. One of them was brought by the Tate Gallery and is still in its collection.85

And this is the point, the Tate as a recognised authority deems and values the can of excrement as an object of aesthetic value to be pondered and considered of important cultural and artistic significance, protected and valued in the vaults of artistic achievement.

Carey points out that the term ‘art’ wasn’t even used before the late eighteenth century, not in our sense anyway. Pre-industrial society did not have a word for art and the Greek and Roman civilizations would have been baffled by the term. Also the word ‘aesthetic’ is also relatively new, coming into use in 1750 by Alexander Baumgarten, in reference to text by Kant and his ‘Critique of Judgement’. A text, which stood for some two hundred years as the touchstone of what implied beauty and the human response to it, in Western art at least.

Carey notes that, for Kant, standards of beauty were at the deepest level, absolute and universal. There existed a truth which he called ‘supersensible substrate of nature’, where all such absolutes and universals reside.86 Kant elevated artists to the mantle of geniuses, as they were able to access the supersensible region. Not even scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton could be raised to the status of an artist, as they were simply followers of rules, whereas artistic geniuses discover the new that cannot be learnt or explained.87

Beliefs such as this still exist today in Kantian followers says Carey. It is a belief that real works of art contain a secret ingredient. Formulations on what determines this ingredient are the key to aesthetic value, one being the Golden Section, which can be found in paintings, plans or architecture, including the Egyptian pyramids and renaissance palaces. As it stands, no formula has been found to unlock what defines art and how much value should be assigned it, so the sliding scale of taste and value still sits with the museums, galleries, curators, collectors, auction houses and universities. This is a place they have held since before the start of the twentieth century and the rise of modernism, which challenged and changed all previous assumptions of what art, was.88

Institutional legitimation, from the point of view of the artist at least, first begins by inheriting the role handed down by a particular history through particular institutions. Victor Burgin

85 Carey, John. What Good Are The Arts, Faber Limited, London, 2005, p.4 86 Ibid, p.7-9 87 Ibid, p.11 88 Ibid, p.14-16 49

says in his book, ‘The End of Art Theory’, “for or against them, the relationship to them is inescapable.” 89 Within the institution sits a master discourse. This organises the field for what is generally permissible in terms of what is thinkable, says Burgin. By accepting the master discourse, an inductee is inducted into a common system of beliefs and values, which identifies them as belonging. If opposed to such discourse, as in the art world, it would be to commit one to exile and cause one to disappear over the discursive horizon.

Burgin says art institutions and museums hold the canon of established masterpieces like an art graveyard. He notes:

To be admitted to it is to be consigned to perpetual exhumation, to be denied entry is to be condemned to perpetual oblivion. The canon is what gets written about, collected and taught; it is self-perpetuating, self-justifying and arbitrary; it is the gold standard against which the values of new aesthetic currencies are measured. The canon is the discourse made flesh; the discourse is the spirit of the canon. To refuse the discourse, the words of communion with canon, in speaking of art or in making it, is to court the benign violence of institutional excommunication.90

Institutional authority is a point of status for Richard Wollheim when discussing artifacts in his book, ‘Art and Its Objects’. The classifying of an artifact from the position of the institutionalised art world is one where if they set to confer status upon an artifact, they can only be successful if they have certain reasons to justify their selection, other than it is an artifact. They are in effect bestowing upon the artifact conferment of status, be that inappropriately, as afterward the artifact enjoys status that it did not have prior to their action.91

This shift of artifact to status artifact, it would seem, requires only the input of an institution to bestow this privilege on it, as they themselves are recognised to have the appropriate status. Wollheim points out that further justification of this statement may create serious confusion:

The confusion would be between the conditions under which something is (or becomes) a work of art and the conditions under which a work of art is a good work of art. To assert that something is a work of art depends, directly or

89 Burgin, Victor. The End of Art Theory, Criticism and Postmodernity, 1986, Reprint 1987, 1988, p.158 90 Ibid, p.159 91 Wollheim, Richard. Art and Its Objects, UK. 1968, p.161 50

indirectly, only upon status; by contrast, to assert that a work of art is a good work of art does require to be backed up by reasons, and it receives no support from status.92

In his book, ‘The Art Question’, Nigel Warburton has also attempted to understand the current attitudes and beliefs in determining the seemingly mystical alchemy that turns an artifact into an artwork of great value and worth in the current contemporary market. Warburton cites as an example the writer George Dickie, who believes that an artwork requires a certain acknowledgement to be bestowed on it before raising it to the level of art. Through such acknowledgement, a status of appreciation is granted upon it (or not) from those who act on behalf of the social institution that is the art world.93

Warburton finds that a viewpoint such as this by Dickie, makes it difficult to sort which things should be considered of high esteem or worth engaging with. Seen from Dickie’s perspective, all things be it trivial or worthless are now art, once approved by a recognised member of the art world. This is a point of contention with Dickie’s critics who see it as implying that certain members of the art world possess a Midas touch. Warburton says that Dickie is clear that even if certain members possess such ability to transform everyday objects into valuable art, it is in no way implying the object’s relative value, be it aesthetic, artistic or otherwise.94

Dickie also requires that to be an artwork, it first must be an artifact. Warburton notes that:

Dickie makes artifactuality a necessary condition. Obviously it can’t be a sufficient condition since that would mean that every artifact was automatically a work of art. If both conditions are met then the artifact with conferred status is guaranteed to be a work of art, or ‘artwork’ as he terms it.95

Warburton sees Dickie’s use of artifact as meaning ‘having been worked or modified by human intervention’. This, for Warburton, has a theoretical flaw when viewed in a contemporary sense. For example, if you were to take a piece of driftwood from the beach and place it within a gallery space, this artifact has been acknowledged and raised to the

92 Wollheim, Richard. Art and Its Objects, UK. 1968, p.163 93 Warburton, Nigel. The Art Question, Routledge, UK, First published, 2003, p.95. 94 Ibid, p.95-96 95 Ibid, p.96-97 51

status of art without any human intervention other than the pacing of it there – the art world is recognising it for simply being.96

For the writer and theorist, Jean Baudrillard, the artistic world no longer believes in the destiny of art anymore. This is an environment of navel gazing where no one claims to be an artist anymore but everyone makes claims of banality. Baudrillard sees this as a completely self-referential world that justifies itself from the inside. Its symbolic expression is the art market, autonomous and cut off from the real economy of value, developing into a sort of abnormality or outgrowth on society. This art market would be viewed as a conspiracy, says Baudrillard, which has formed to the rules of its own game.97

One artist at least, who Baudrillard felt held a mirror to this self-referential world was the American, Andy Warhol, even though calling Warhol an artist would be a contradiction, as he would not have accepted the term, says Baudrillard. He explains what made him so unique:

Warhol went the furthest in abolishing the subject of art, of the artist, by withdrawing from the creative act. Behind this mechanical snobbery, there is in fact an escalation in the power of the object, the sign, the image, the simulacrum and value, of which the best example today is the art market itself. This goes well beyond the alienation of price as a real measure of things; we are experiencing a fetishism of value that explodes the very notion of a market and, at the same time, abolishes the artwork as a work of art.98

What Baudrillard shows is a contradiction in terms. On the one hand he is applauding Warhol’s legacy for debasing and replacing art by turning the artist into an object of banal value and adoration. Then, on the other hand, he criticises both artist and art market alike for looking to legacies such as this and creating contemporary versions of value from it. One that Baudrillard sees as being both self-referential in style and approach. For me, however, it can be seen as a forerunner of what may be termed the brand celebrity artist. Beneficiaries of which include American, Jeff Koons, and Britain’s Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin.

Baudrillard places current art and artists in a value trap as he explains in this statement:

96 Warburton, Nigel. The Art Question, Routledge, UK, First published 2003, p.97 97 Baudrillard, Jean. The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotext(e), USA, 2005, p.56-57 98 Ibid, p.44. 52

The world is aligned on a revolutionary act – the readymade – and forms survive on this counter-field, but all the rest, all of this mechanism has become value (aesthetic value and market value). Art has been transformed into value, and we should oppose form to value - for me, art is fundamentally form – and say that we have been caught in the trap and even, through the art market, into a sort of ecstasy of value, a bulimia, an excrescence of value. Luckily, however, I still believe that form – in other words the illusion of the world and the possibility to invent this other scene – persists, though through a form of radical exception.99

This value trap of ecstasy that contemporary artists now finds themselves enclosed within was built, set and sprung by two artists already mentioned in relation to valuation – Duchamp and Warhol.

In Warhol’s case, it is not a trap to catch and remove creativity but a brand trap to ensnare dealers, investors and the art world elite.

Donald Kuspit, art critic and writer, says to achieve this aim, Warhol became an expert in what is now termed ‘experimental marketing’. That is, he became a brand name viewed in the same way as the very products he painted and promoted, e.g. Campbell’s Soup and Coca- Cola. This was an artist who laid a post-modern highway for other artists to travel and follow him on. Warhol embraced technology, mass production and modern marketing.100

Warhol understood the power of identity and fame, and what owning objects of revered celebrities meant, not unlike the devotional and sacred that is endowed on objects of religious reliquary. For investors and collectors, this is about possessing an item of Warhol through possessing a piece of him. As Kuspit notes, Warhol’s genius was that he had become a genie inhabiting his own objects in a power that was more significant than any of them.101

It is this ability to emit a perfume that will make the artist irresistible to the consumer and market that underpins experimental marketing. This is what Warhol understood and has become what Baudrillard refers to as a value trap – the ability to not only, satisfy the material level of the consumer, but to satisfy the unconscious cognitive needs also. This is where both advertising and art meet, for it is at this level of the consumer that driving forces such as status and greed abide.

99 Baudrillard, Jean. The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotext(e), USA, 2005, p.57 100 Burgin, Victor. The End of Art Theory, Criticism and Postmodernity, 1986, p.76 101 Ibid, p.78 53

Whether it be a museum collector or dealer owning a Warhol, Hirst, Koons or Emin, paying a high price and value to possess such a brand name means their artworks will never revert to what Kuspit calls ‘unart’. This is simply due to the fact that belonging to the world of investment properties and portfolios, elevates them above the intellectual speculation that made them artists in the first place. 102

Kuspit says this post-modern world is now a post-art world, driven essentially by a personality market. This is now the art sale of the century, except it is not art that is for sale, but the artist. How well artists can sell themselves is the key to success.103 Becoming a VIP in the art world means becoming an artist with a valuable personality.

Value now rests in the brand of the artist. Kuspit describes what this means to a market driven art world:

There is no need to know the human value of art, only its value in the market. Marketing confuses values; we readily mistake inhuman values for human values because the former are so well packaged, which is the problem with post-art. The spectator has become the customer; he has to be confused – morally and intellectually – to invest in post-art, emotionally and economically.104

This, for Kuspit, is the mystique that is created by marketing to allow value to be assigned to the artist’s signature forming a recognised post-artist name. In the commercial world of advertising, marketing uses exactly the same approach to build and add value to a product name, and raise it above and beyond an object of tactile function to one, which is of branded status and prestige. This is the world of cultural status, brands and celebrity of the personality market that both art and advertising share.105

Looking even closer at correlations between art and advertising, they seem to share a type of cultural capital in terms of production and consumption, says Joan Gibbons in the book, ‘Art and Advertising’. Gibbons explores the relationship between the two to better explain the ways in which cultural status is conferred and commended through branding and celebrity.106

102 Baudrillard, Jean. The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotext(e), USA, 2005, p.78 103 Burgin, Victor. The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity, 1986, p.87 104 Ibid, p.87 105 Ibid, p.84 106 Gibbons, Joan. Art and Advertising, I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, London, 2005, p.134 54

Gibbons defines cultural capital as:

An accumulation of knowledge competencies and goods, that have been acquired, in order to mark out a position in the ranking and hierarchies of society. Art, with its connotations of genius and exclusivity has long been a signifier of this sort of capital, allowing those with knowledge, appreciation or ownership and ‘good’ and ‘great’ works to foster a sense of distinction by proxy.107

In advertising, cultural capital has played its role through expressing the idea that if you buy Product X, you will also receive or acquire the associations that come with it. This may be achieved, for example, by the reference to a famous artist or a famous work of art. Through association, the status of both the product and the consumer become upgraded. Negotiating and responding to brands for the purpose of social positioning requires, says Gibbons, both media literacy and the acquisition of knowledge of cultural capital through the media. It is a symbiotic relationship, where the media are feeding off real life events as much as people incorporate the media response to these events into their own lives. Gibbons sees the media role then as providing a greater choice of cultural capital in a variety of models and contexts. Some of these models or contexts may command more attention than others due to reasons such as media exposure.108

This is a consideration when looking at the role of the media and the relationship it has with contemporary art which, as Gibbons points out, is why many contemporary artists owe their ‘brand identity’ to the attention that the media has given them.

Gibbons argues that for both advertisers and artists to connect and sell effectively to the public, a key component is the cult of celebrity. It has influenced and affected both the role of the artist and how he or she is perceived. It has altered the landscape of how a product is branded and given status, some even attaining a position of celebrity status or role of cultural ‘hero’.109

A case in point is contemporary British artist, Tracy Emin. In the book, “The Art of Tracy Emin’, Lorna Healy tells how after a live interview that Emin gave in 2001 at the Tate, fans

107 Gibbons, Joan. Art and Advertising, I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, London, 2005, p.134 108 Ibid, p.134 109 Ibid, p.135 55

queued for so long that in the end they had to be removed from the auditorium by security guards.110

Emin’s fans, says Healy, seem to have a wish to possess Emin both sexually and romantically. It would seem there is no distinction between the persona of Emin and her work. For fans, Emin provokes powerful feelings and emotional responses. These responses are unusual in the world of contemporary art, usually seen and saved for the royalty of pop stars such as Madonna, and movie celebrities. It would be hard to imagine shouts of ‘I love you and your work’ at, say, an Auerbach or Craig-Martin opening, says Healy. She notes that Emin’s work is entirely of her time and is made possible because of at least three things:

1. The death of 1980s Neo-Expressionist painting; 2. The space created by feminism for the communication of (traumatic) personal stories; and 3. The development within popular culture, mainly music, of the kind of personal commitment to the “star” experienced by fans.111

Emin’s most prominent and controversial work was for the Turner Prize, titled ‘’ (1998). It included the artist’s bed, soiled sheets, bloodied underwear, emptied vodka bottles, discarded tissues, fag ends, used condoms and other post-coital detritus.112 (I)

Reactions to ‘My Bed’ from the media could be represented by an article penned by Johnny Vaughan who, at the time, was writing for the newspaper, The Sunday Mirror:

My elderly readers have written in their thousands to grumble about the so-called artwork – nominated for the Turner Prize – Tracy Emin’s “My Bed”. Her piece is basically a heavily soiled unmade bed surrounded by vodka bottles, contraceptives and dirty pants. Now I don’t know much about arts, but I do know that Emin’s so-called “Bed” is a disgrace. Its message that it’s hip and cool to drink alcohol, wet your bed and not wipe your bottom properly is misleading to the young and abhorrent to pensioners.

But Emin seems determined to insult. When two Chinese art galleries disturbed her installation this week, though she had the opportunity to rethink her work,

110 Merck, Mandy. Townsend, Chris. (Editors) The Art of Tracy Emin, Thames & Hudson, 2002, p.155 111 Ibid, p.156-7 112 Ibid, p.119 56

she still couldn’t be bothered to make the bed, let alone pick up her dirty clothes. No wonder the grey army has its hackles up! If we’re going to consider this sort of stuff as art, wouldn’t it be better if the elderly had more input? Not only do they have limitless spare time to visit galleries, they also have discounts on admission. With that in mind, the bed should have its sheets changed immediately, and Emin’s junk should be removed and replaced with more OAP- friendly items113.

I suggest a pair of sheepskin-trimmed slippers, a half-eaten packet of Rich Tea biscuits, a prosthetic limb, a bottle of heavy-duty blood pressure tablets, a blackmail letter from a drug-addicted grandson, a box of Trill budgie food and a framed, out of focus, photograph of Richard Whitely leaving the Channel 4 building. Now that’s art!114

For Vaughan, the value that exists in art or an art object is self evident in the aesthetic qualities that the work does or does not contain. Vaughan has placed the bed in the art gallery and found it wanting, when the bed, like him, lives in a world of media, advertising, blogging and the Internet.

Donald Kuspit points out this is now the age of the post-modern artist. Unlike their past modernist counterparts, the post-modern artist is not interested in the alchemy of art but an audience that will deliver to them celebrity, popularity and charisma to which they believe they are entitled. It is not a case of bringing meaning to their life in the pursuit of extracting the meaning of everyday life and melting it down into the gold of high art. Instead, it is losing themselves in a world of entertainment, becoming celebrities and celebrating the crowd.115 The post-modern artist receives their identity from this crowd rather than by non- conformist creativity:

They are disillusioned about art but still have illusions about themselves – about what art can do for them – which is make them rich and famous.116

Kuspit points to another British artist who is both a contemporary of Emin and past winner of the Turner Prize, Damien Hirst. Hirst had created an installation of rubbish, which was

113 Vaughan, Johnny. Sunday Mirror Newspaper Column, Let’s Start with a Clean Sheet, Oct 31, 1999 114 Ibid 115 Kuspit, Donald. The End of Art, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p.56 116 Ibid, p.57 57

mistakenly binned by a cleaner of the gallery in which the work was being shown. The cleaner had seen the work as anonymous rubbish rather than an original Damien Hirst. Hirst was thrilled with the outcome, as his art was about the relationship between art and the everyday. Kuspit notes.

That everyday life is more interesting than art, and art is only interesting when it is mistaken for everyday life, even if that means it loses its identity as art, which it only had because it was exhibited in a place called an art gallery and thus on its way to being institutionalised as art. The cleaning man was clearly the right critic.117

This is a world of Post-art happenings and events turning non-art milieus into art, where daily life is to be seen as something special. It is the blurring of the line between high art and the everyday world that has created raw life as interesting art and post-art must be taken on faith, as a minor cult, according to Kuspit.118

The complexity of identifying and applying the term ‘brand’ to an artist such as Tracy Emin, shows that nothing or no-one sits in a place of autonomy. Forces and movements that proceed us all shape and influence both present and future arts and culture responses. To place Emin’s ‘My Bed’ in context and overlay the term ‘post-modernism’ on it, requires acknowledging the past, including in the ‘preceding movement of Modernism.

In the book ‘The Anti Aesthetic’ writer and art critic Hal Foster presents views on modernism including theorist Frederic Jameson who believes the great modernisms were predicated on the invention of a personal, private style, as unmistakeable as your fingerprint, as incomparable as your own body. For Jameson, the modernist aesthetic is in some way organically linked to the conception of a unique self and private identity, a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world and to forge its own unique, unmistakeable style.119

Today however, if one is referring to a brand culture where the identification of the consumer with the brand becomes ever more entwined and lost within the brand, the influence of the brand celebrity (or artist) should be considered in regards to what its role may be in determining who or what becomes of importance and value within it.

117 Kuspit, Donald. The End of Art, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p.74 118 Ibid, p.75 119 Foster, Hal. The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture. Bay Press, USA, 6th Edition 1989, p.112-113 58

Society today for Jameson is one that is not easily irritated or scandalized by whatever is served up as contemporary art on its cultural plate. Unlike high modernism production, post- modern society had no problem with, let’s say, sexually explicit material as found in the commercially successful art form of punk rock.120

This tells Jameson that although contemporary art may have formal features as in the model of modernism, it still has shifted position fundamentally within our culture. He states:

Commodity production and in particular clothing, furniture, buildings and other artifacts are now intimately tied in with styling changes which derive from artistic experimentation; our advertising, for example, is fed by postmodernism in all the arts and is inconceivable without it.121

This has come about for Jameson through high modernism and aesthetics becoming established in the academy in the early 1960s. This in turn produced postmodernist theory to be sanctified by a new wave of academics, poets, painters and musicians including Jameson himself.

Through this institutional and academic critical discourse, the object returned once more towards the end of the 1980s. This would be however, says Eleanor Heartney, writer and art commentator, not the aestheticised art object valorised in modernist discourse but a post- modern art object decked out with gleaming new theoretical raiment and sparkled with impressively obscure terms like simulacrum, hyper-reality, critical complicity and commodity critique.122

Foster, sees the emergence of the new post-modern object with its new vocabulary of terms as “questioning rather than exploiting cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and political affiliations.”123

James Elkins refers to the theorist Arthur C. Danto as an example of where such contention in theory and time arises. Elkins, also a theorist, says that for Danto, postmodernism could be located between modernism and postmodernism with the appearance of the American Pop

120 Foster, Hal. The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture. Bay Press, USA, 6th Edition 1989, p.124 121 Ibid, p.124 122 Heartney, Eleanor. Postmodernism. Tate Publishing, London. 2001. Reprint 2004, 2005, p.41 123 Foster, Hal. The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture, Bay Press, USA, 1989, Preface p.12 59

Artist, Andy Warhol and his work titled, ‘Brillo Boxes’ (1964). For Danto, everything after Warhol and this seminal work in terms of art history ended because anything became possible. Other writers who share the moment of transition between modernism and postmodernism through Pop Art include Thomas McEvilley, Donald Kuspit, Robert Rosenblum, and Leo Steinberg. Through authors such as these, the arguments after Pop Art became eclectic or pluralist, says Elkins. The issues were now around addressing the condition of late capitalism.124

For Arthur C. Danto, releasing ‘After the End of Art’ (1995) was a follow-up to both his and other theorists’ writings of the 1960s. The book came about after visiting the Stable Gallery in Manhattan, New York, which was showing new work by the American artist, Andy Warhol. What Danto did not expect to see however, was an artwork that would both confront and impact the debate on art’s value and meaning presented in the shape of a .125

Danto comments:

The end of Art was never advanced as a critical judgement at all, but as an objective historical judgement.126

Danto saw himself as simply posing the question, what makes the difference between one object being classified as a work of art, and another not, if there is no perceptual difference between them? Many saw Warhol’s Brillo Boxes as being classified in the “not” basket, but Danto was convinced they were works of art. For Danto, a deep exciting question was being posed that was differentiating between a storeroom supermarket box and the one fabricated by Warhol. This lack of difference was between them only highlighted by an inability to explain the difference between reality and art.127

This had become for Danto a philosophical question initially to explain when they were works of art. Ultimately, however, no conclusion needed to be reached. As Danto saw it, once art itself raised the true form of the philosophical question – that is, the question of the difference between artworks and real things – history was over. The philosophical moment

124 Elkins, James. Master Narratives and their Discontents, Routledge, USA, 2005, p.85-86 125 Danto, Arthur C. After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. 1997, p.24 126 Ibid, p.24 127 Ibid, p.35 60

had been attained. Further questions could be asked and answered in the future by other theorists, philosophers and artists.128

Mike Featherstone says the problem that arises in defining postmodernism through philosophy and texts is that the word has been canonised by academia, museums and galleries, and has different interpretations to each different field. From here, intellectuals and theorists use, interpret and frame the term for their own set of everyday experiences, cultural artifacts and models. Out of this, Featherstone says a number of features arise on the meaning of postmodernism – as in, postmodernism is an attack on autonomous institutionalised art to deny its grounds and purpose.129

The artist cannot make art that is seen as a higher form of experience, which has derived from the artist’s special qualities and creative genius. The artist is doomed to repetition as everything is already seen and written. The artwork has moved beyond the creative aspect of art to become iconified by the museum and unrecognisable between art and everyday life. Art is everywhere in the refuse, the body, the happening. There is no distinction between high art or serious art, mass popular art and kitsch.130

In the book ‘The End of the Art World’ Robert C Morgan refers to the term kitsch from the American art critic Clement Greenberg and his famous 1939 essay ‘Avante Garde and Kitsch’. Morgan determined that for Greenberg a work of art must have a sensory qualitative presence, if not it than it was kitsch and debased as the sensory numbing effects of mass production. For Morgan contemporary art still is kitsch, because it roots still lie in what Greenberg saw as the antithesis of kitsch and bad taste pop art. For Morgan the difference between Greenberg kitsch and current exponents such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst is they have qualitative presence in representing the market through fabricated spectacles but they do it without the intervention of criterion131.

In post-modern terms, pop artists weren’t out to create aesthetic of kitsch or undermine bastions of authority, they were just reflecting the new and ever-expanding consumer soaked and branded culture into their art practice. Whereas Hirst or Koons who have had the luxury of time and, kitsch arguments behind them, willingly entered into and adopted the corporate and advertising brand culture, not just through their art but also as a part of what constitutes

128 Danto, Arthur C. After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. 1997, p.113 129 Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, Sage publications, 1991, p.122 130 Ibid, p.122 131 Morgan C Robert The End of the Art. World. pp.19-26 61

their identity, Featherstone finds art in postmodernism unrecognisable from everyday life. For me, it is because of artists such as Koons, Hirst and Emin that it is this way and that the line between media, art, advertising and branding has become increasingly blurred.

For John Carey, seeing art now in a world that cannot distinguish between say a blue painted tie by Picasso and the same blue tie pained by a child is seeing the world through Danto’s eyes where in the physical make up of a work art doesn’t matter. What does matter is how it was regarded and thought of.132 Carey says Danto saw that an object had to be defined as two distinct categories, works of art on one hand and mere ‘things’ on the other, which should not be exalted to the status of art. To do this, a compromise must be made by Danto, says Carey. He explains:

The compromise entails switching attention from the thing itself – the Brillo Box, say – to the kind of people who regarded it as a work at art. For their opinion to matter, these people must, Danto decided, belong to the art world. That is, they must be experts and critics with an understanding of modern art. To see something as art required an atmosphere of artistic theory a knowledge of the history of art. Only the opinion of such people can turn an object into a work of art, and they are qualified to do this because they can understand its meaning.133

This meaning must also be the correct one intended by the artist, as Danto sees it, with his exemplified theory of the blue ties.134

The only thing that separates our understanding of what differentiates Picasso’s tie from the child is meaning. In the child’s tie, the applied smooth paint has one purpose, to look nice for the child’s parents whereas Picasso’s tie relates to the history of modern art.

For Danto, interpreting the child’s tie is opening up debate for unlimited meaning which is an unworkable criterion, good taste, says Danto, cannot be learned. It is a gift.135 For Carey, attitudes such as this by Danto are elitist seeing art belonging to people with good taste who are congenitally superior – a separate breed.

132 Carey, John. What Good Are The Arts?, Faber Limited, 2005, p.17 133 Ibid, p.18-19 134 Ibid, p.19 135 Ibid, p.22 62

Carey points out that in one of the most thorough investigations of the arts which incorporated results collected over a hundred years revealed no evidence to support Danto’s beliefs. The data was collated into a book titled, ‘The Psychology of the Arts’ by Hans and Shulamith Kreitler and covered experimental aesthetics, sociology, anthropology and psychology across 1,5000 items. It was concluded that no two people’s responses to a work are quite the same. There are simply too many variables, which include cognitive, emotional personality, perception, personal experience, past encounters with art and individual memories and associations.136

Modern art and the Tracy Emin’s ‘Bed’ are seen through the spectrum of the Charles Saatchi phenomenon synonymous with money, fashion, celebrity and . The art critic and writer, Robert Hughes, says art’s surviving role in our mass media society is to be investment capital. Effective political art is now impossible because an artist must be famous to be heard, and as he acquires fame, his art acquires value and becomes, ipso facto, harmless.137

Is this now where our bed sits, to be squeezed into a rationale of value by the intellectual elite and institutions of the art world on one side and the media-making fame machine of the artist on the other?

This is a bed devoid of meaning and identity from a consumer’s viewpoint until it is labelled and assigned one. Jean Baudrillard says:

Some say that art is dematerialising. The exact opposite is true: art today has thoroughly entered reality. It is in museums and galleries, but also in trash, on walls, in the street, in the banality of everything that has been made sacred today without any further debate. The aesthetisation of the world is complete. Just as we now have a bureaucratic materialisation of the social, a technological materialisation of sexuality, a media and advertising materialisation of politics, we have a semiotic materialisation of art. It is a culture understood as the officialisation of everything in terms of signs and the circulation of signs.138

We have become a culture that now uses its museums for aesthetic storage, says Baudrillard, a Xerox of the world of form that surrounds us. He calls it ‘Degree Xerox of Culture’. Art is

136 Carey, John. What Good Are The Arts?, Faber Limited, 2005, p.24-25 137 Ibid, p.25-26 138 Baudrillard, Jean. The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotext(e), USA, 2005, p.105 63

no more than prosthesis of advertising and culture. Once art was a dramatic simulacrum where the reality of the world and illusion were in play.139

Or is it just a case of role reversal where art has now become the simulacrum of branding, in the same way we substitute consumer culture, for our own indifference and lost sense of self- identity. Is it all a case of delusion or, as Baudrillard notes, art, like history, seems as if it were rummaging through its own trashcans, seeking to redeem itself with its waste.140

For Baudrillard, the world is full of modern artists who think they are making objects of art when, in fact, are doing something altogether different. They are producing objects of purely decorative and fetish nature. Deriving from the same inspiration as sexual fetishism, it is not a belief in sex, but only the idea of sex that matters. In the modern artist, it is no longer a belief in art, only the idea of it that matters. What this means for Baudrillard is that all modern art is conceptual in the sense that it fetishises the concept. In exactly the same way, what is fetishised in commodity is not a real value but the abstract stereotype of value.141

Using Baudrillard’s construct, we could then say, that the artist and their work have now become fetishes, not through artistic value, but through the simulacrum of brand value.

139 Baudrillard, Jean. The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotext(e), USA, 2005, p.105 140 Ibid, p.112 141 Ibid, p.126 64

CHAPTER 3: LIVING IN A BRANDED STATE OF MIND

The complexities of establishing the playing field of what constitutes an artwork and the value that pertains to it were discussed in the chapter, “A Brand New Aesthetic Value”. The next step requires the expertise of dealers, organisations and individuals who sit between the artist and the market of collectors and investors. As discussed in relation to value, defining what is or isn’t exactly art requires education and acknowledgement from the art world. So for a collector or investors the art language may seem to contain no physical or aesthetic qualities of art, only the idea, ‘eluding’ to it.

Trusting money to an idea can make investors or collectors insecure about who or what is of value in contemporary art today. The term, ‘backing a sure thing’ is applicable to investors in art, as it is to weekend punters of racehorses. So, to reduce the risk, they turn to art and artists who have attained a branded profile. To do this, Don Thompson says, collectors patronise branded dealers, bid at auction houses, visit branded art fairs and seek out branded artists. You are nobody in contemporary art until you have been branded.142

Establishing provenance from recognised institutions, be that auction houses such as Christies and Sotheby’s or museums such as the Tate (London), Guggenheim, and MOMA (New York), are paramount if you wish to se your investment yield high returns along with the status, class and validation of your taste.

Status, class and taste, of course, are not unique to the art world. They are key words understood by all people across the height width and breadth of society today. There are many factors to condition an individual to react to keywords such as these. In the most part they lay benign, held within an individuals value system, an identity which has evolved through childhood, adolescence and finally into adulthood. For me these are emotionally charged nodes, buried seemingly well within. That may be triggered if engaged by the right cognitive spark, such as advertising or branding.

For the purpose of understanding branding within art, we must also understand branding – or the psychology of it at least – in the bigger picture of culture and how advertisers release our deepest and most benign memories, and turn them into emotionally charged issues that drive both consuming habits towards branding and art.

142 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.12-13 65

What really makes an average brand become a super brand is the ability to infuse it with meaning in the mind of the consumer – “it’s a toaster, yes, but equally it is a high profile brand and as such stands for something”. To assist or accelerate this process, advertisers build into their customer base brand names, colours and trademarks. These symbols make the brand familiar, recognisable and consistent with things consumer’s value within their cultural way of life.143

A symbol is a sign that conjures up additional points of reference outside of its own intended significance or what it stands for. This can be referenced if considering the Mercedes Benz automobile. In America and Asia it has a status of luxury, whereas in Lisbon, Portugal it is a taxi. For a successful product, the advertisers must inject the brand with symbolic meanings. These can be social advancement, relationships with the opposite sex, self-confidence, intensity, excitement, sophistication, individuality or a rebellious nature.144

To enhance the symbolic nature of the brand, and infuse it with even more layers of meaning, logos and are incorporated. Slogans have become so popular that they have entered the cultural vocabulary, such as with Nike, “just do it”. They are components in differentiating one brand product from another.

It is this strength in understanding the target audience’s slang that makes advertisers so successful. They grasp that the public has individual life experiences, each with its own emotional significance, so in speaking to this audience, they must do it through a man-made socially constructed symbolic system. A good reason for this is individual values. Once established, they affect how people interact or view opinions other than their own. This usually means individuals have a limited perspective on systems that sit outside of their own cultural beliefs within society. This deep-rooted build-up of cultural signs or symbols can be witnessed in religion. The intolerance, hate and mistrust in other cultural religious values and belief systems can be seen on a daily basis within media and news reports. For people to believe or support a value system they must adopt a ‘coherent theory of truth’, that is, it is coherent with their current beliefs.145 In the case of advertising, this is a brand ‘hook’ that must have obvious consumer values if a customer is to identify it.

Symbols also allow human beings to have shared memories through a collective existence. Brand names themselves carry association, which may be positive or negative. If considering

143 O’Shaughnessy, Jackson, Nicholas. O’Shaughnessy, John. Persuasion in Advertising, Routledge, 2004, p.67 144 Ibid, p.39 145 Ibid, p.41-42 66

the purchase of clothing, the consumer wants a brand line that evokes a positive association. It is being associated with success, or the beautiful crowd. For products to carry such attributes and reflect them through symbolic values, the advertisers will have had to be effective in applying the correct and appropriate connotations. One such connotation that never fails to raise a response through brand product association is sex. Sex has the ability to arouse strong opinions and emotional responses and is a way of enhancing the Brand image with qualities of desire.146

In art, desire is also a means of artists expressing themselves within their work and in the way they sell themselves through a projected persona.

As with advertisers, artists need to connect with an audience. This may be of the singular kind, or in a group, strength in numbers. Groups may form through association, as in art galleries and colleges, otherwise it may be around a mutual goal, or acquaintance. An example of this within my thesis, are the aforementioned YBA’s. This was a group where the hooks of advertising were now the hooks of the artist, be it sex, death, porn, shock, vomit, garbage or flies. With hindsight, we can see that this group of individuals grasped an important principle of brand building you don’t sell art, but yourself.

The same principles can apply to institutions or museums such as the Tate Britain, an ongoing concern that encompasses not just the Tate on Millbank but the , Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. The Tate has so embraced the commercial aspect of art in the consumer market that in 2002-2003, it staged a self-reflexive show called, ‘Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture’. The show featured such artists as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Christo, Barbara Kruger, Jeff Koons, Andreas Gursky and Claus Oldenberg to name just a few.

Twitchell describes the relevance of the show when he remarks:

Here was ample proof of the impact of consumption on the fine arts, architecture, film, music, aesthetics, and structure to say nothing of the environment. The only analogy was religious culture of the Renaissance. Like religion then, consumption is now everywhere. Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture wasn’t tongue-in-cheek or even cheeky about this transformation of value systems. It was the Tate’s frank acceptance that buying

146 O’Shaughnessy, Jackson, Nicholas. O’Shaughnessy, John. Persuasion in Advertising, Routledge, 2004, p.59 67

stuff, has been an essential part of urban life throughout the twentieth century and that because of it, Museumworld itself has been transformed.147

Shows such as ‘Shopping’ held at the Tate are, as Twitchell says, the acknowledgement and acceptance of a culture driven by consumerism and an art world trying to reflect that they play a part in that.148

Joan Gibbons, in the book ‘Art & Advertising’ also sees the role of the artist as one that has tried to engage on an artistic level the changes since the start of the twentieth century and the products of mass production, which have shaped and tagged us as a consumer culture. Early avant-gardes movements such as cubism, dadaism and surrealism have all responded to consumerism and advertising in their way, but pop artists have had the most impact because the rise of consumerism in the west and a product boom after the end of the Second World War.149

After Pop, there wasn’t a focus on commodity art until the 1980-1990s, known as the Capitalist Realists. Gibbons says they continued earlier work by German artists, Gerhard Richter and Leug who, in 1963, explored the consumer and product lifestyle that was then emerging.150

Capitalist Realists are now considered some of the most important and successful artists working in the world today, such as Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach and Sylvie Fleury. All three artists have engaged with and used readymade commodities to place and present as works of art within a gallery. For Koons, this took the form of brand-new vacuum cleaners placed and lit in neon showcases from his series, ‘The New’ (1980-1986). This show brought focus to the culture of shopping, the fascination of window gazing and the lure of the brand – Hoovers, to be precise. How we glorify and connect to commodities in this series has now a touch of irony, for it is now Koons himself that is glorified and collected as a brand by the uber-rich of the art world as the ultimate rare and valuable of commodities, which these days can only be achieved by exchanging millions of dollars for art works that Koons made to bring awareness to the obsession of collecting mass-produced, disposable commodities with works such as ‘The New’ that brought awareness to the desire of commodities. Maybe this was his intent all along and just needed time to reveal its true meaning. All three artists bring the aspect of the

147 Twitchell, B. James. Branded Nation, Simon and Schuster, Rockefeller Center, NY, 2004, p.245 148 Gibbons, Joan. Art and Advertising, I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, London, 2005, p.72 149 Ibid, p.68 150 Ibid, p.68-73 68

department stores, which evoke in the consumer a strong sense of desire and fetishisation for the object.

These are also, at least for Koons and Steinbach, products of middle-class consumerism, works based on desire, or trying to find the fulfilment of desire, which brands, advertising and products so often promise to deliver, but never do.151

Each in their way show, that art is placed firmly in a system of commerce that both the producer and collector must negate. For Steinbach, this has been shown through his display of shelf works, ‘Supremely Black’ (1985), where objects such as vases sit beside boxes of branded washing powder, or Fleury, who produces installations of unopened boxes of expensive high-heeled shoes set against pink walls on which is written the word, ‘Pleasures’ (1996), evoking the beauty and fashion industry who sells itself through feminine seduction. The merger of art and advertising in works such as the Capitalist Realists or in the show, ‘Shopping’ at the Tate, is not just, as Twitchell says, a story to sell the brand. It has become the story of capitalism in which both art and advertising now play a pivotal role. Gibbons sees it not as a question of placing art and advertising into their respective aesthetic arenas, which they both inhabit, it is to acknowledge how far each have moved toward each other.152

Blending art and advertising into brands of consumption is just carrying on the tradition laid down by the first great showman, PT Barnum and his American Museum, says Twitchell. When it opened in the 1840’s, thousands of people lined up to see the head of a monkey crudely sewn onto the body of a fish, or a rhinoceros advertised as a unicorn. He understood and mastered branding, because he knew how to sell and spin a story. In the hands of a master, says Twitchell, branding becomes more than clap trap that you jury-rigged around your product. When it worked what you sold was, the product and the humbug, the steak and the sizzle. Today, we can see the legacy of PT Barnum at MOMA where a well-promoted and advertised show produces lines that can run around the block and where all show visits end with obligatory souvenirs.153

This is what the artist and museums are following today, Barnum’s showmanship of selling the show, through the means of advertising and branding, the bigger the spectacle, the larger the purse. Looking to Barnum, it is easy to see his sideshow acts and images that startle, amuse, shock and lift the viewer in the arts today, or in artists such as Hirst who could be seen,

151 Gibbons, Joan. Art and Advertising, I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, London, 2005, p.68-73 152 Ibid, p.68-73 153 Twitchell, B. James. Branded Nation, Simon and Schuster, Rockefeller Center, NY, 2004, p.214-219 69

with his dissected sheep and cows, as Barnum’s successor. He knows that art lives and competes in an entertainment market. Many of his works would have probably fitted nicely into the acts and displays of Barnum’s museum. In the future, there may be just that – Hirst’s Museum of the Weird and Wonderance where you pay to see the most expensive artworks that were ever made and collected.

Art and advertising are a symbiotic relationship. Why? – Because we function in a culture that is symbiotic between ourselves, and consumerism. Barnum knew to push the brand story of his museum to the public, the key vehicle was advertising. Why advertising affects all levels of society, including the arts, is its ability to connect to a consumer identity. Jib Fowles from the book, ‘Advertising and Popular Culture’, sees advertising’s role in social values as ambiguous, asking if social values are created, or simply mirrored. He does not see the consumer as a sheep, which willingly accepts the idealization presented in advertising. If this were the case, society would have uniformity in taste and appearance. Viewing an array of current ads, it becomes apparent that advertisers only depict a small slice of social actuality. Ads distill human appearance and condition into an acceptable apotheosis, which is then projected back to a waiting audience who are happy to digest a singular rendition.154

Fowles concludes that advertising creates a mirroring of reality, which is only surface deep. This surface reality contains images of people who are stripped of ethnicity and neutralised in appearance. They are also stripped of , age, and class. Individuals in the prime of their lives are presented as paragons of gender. These are present, sometimes as part of ‘problem and remedy’ ads. Advertisers are producing abstract points of cultural reference through an idealised state. From this, consumers can either reject or accept the varying standards of perfection on offer into their own values of social conscience. Advertising is constantly moving the gauge of what the stereotype is. This is a reflection of what the public think they are, or think they want to be. It’s an ongoing refining of an image and the creation of a need for that image. From a survey covering 2,200 adults, a table was created to establish percentages of their two most important needs. What emerged was:155

Self respect 21.1% Security 20.6% Warm relationships with others 16.2% Accomplishment 11.4% Self fulfilment 9.6% Being well respected 8.8%

154 Fowles, Jib. Advertising and Popular Culture, Sage Publications, 1996, p.157 155 Ibid, p.159-160 70

Sense of belonging 7.9% Fun/enjoyment/excitement 4.5%

It’s clear from this that self-esteem is paramount. In an age where in material goals and possessions is common, it is surprising that the one thing we would most desire does not come with a price tag – it is our own self-respect, a self-awareness of why we are here and the role we are meant to play.

Fowles suggests, that factors such as these, shape the consumer’s social conscience when making purchases or brand choice. They are neither consciously nor inadvertently relying on advertising for validation. He also acknowledges the importance of the input of family and friends, in choosing and supporting brands.

Only a percentage of information from advertising has the opportunity to be processed and stored to the brain. This happens as the advert enters the consumer mind, and a choice or decision is made to add the symbolic vocabulary to one’s own view of life. If it is relevant it is accepted, rejected if not. The consumer understands that the imagery is not set in hard, fast social realities, but a simplistic, glossy version. Each product, depending on how it is packaged and presented denotes levels of acceptance. The product has to find recognition with a part of one’s life that can resonate with meaning. These may be aspects of defiance, fun, youthfulness, self-assertion, impudence or even nationalistic pride. If these meanings do not make a connection with the consumer audience, then neither will the brand. For this act, advertisers make a conscious decision to deliver ads that depict the primary desires by insinuating a connection between the appeal imagery and the product intending to be sold. In the sphere of consumption, it is not the product that is at the heart of the message, but the consumer. For Fowles, it is not the consumer at the mercy of brands and advertisers, but the other way round. Advertisers lay out a smorgasbord of goods, hoping the consumer engages with their symbolic imagery and enough interest is created so that the consumer’s inner core of need will feel obliged to exchange money for goods.156

As a testimony to the symbolic power of advertising to take objects and make them a part of the cultural landscape, in 1997, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco staged an exhibition titled, “Icons, Magnets of Meaning”. The show premise was straightforward, bringing together 12 objects that had moved to the shelf of iconic status. His intention was to engage the public into seeing well-known icons of the late twentieth century and rethink, as Danto suggests, the material and physical presence that exists between people and the

156 Fowles, Jib. Advertising and Popular Culture, Sage Publications, 1996, p.163-165 71

everyday consumer object. These are, as Aaron Betsky states, more than Nike shoes or a pair of Levi jeans. This exhibition collects objects that, through both use and design, have become anchors in a world in which continual movement and change have replaced static social, economic and political statements.

As all the fixed structures on which we once depended melt away, these objects remain as magnets of meaning onto which we can project our memories, our hopes and our sense of self. In Betsky’s view, these objects — be it a pair of jeans or the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas in the shape of a pyramid — have become abstract and iconic. They are modern day symbols and objects of devotion that bring a sense of focus to our lives. These are not the revered religious icons and symbols of the past — they have now become the consumer culture icons of the present.157 Betsky says we do not use up icons, as objects they fit in our hands, and as spaces they contain us. Something remains even after we have finished using them. In ways that we cannot put our fingers on, they remind us of our bodies, our past, other human beings, and our future.158

Icons become so moulded by the culture that through them we can understand and reveal that culture, capturing a certain time, place, and audience.159 Douglas B Holt, author of How Brands Become Icons, explains,

Brands become iconic when they perform identity myths – simple functions that address cultural anxieties from afar, from imaginary worlds rather than from the worlds that consumers regularly encounter in their everyday lives. The aspirations expressed in these myths are an imaginative, rather than literal, expression of the audience’s aspired identity. Over time, the sustained imagery of the logo name and design elements symbolises the myth. Now consumers, by wearing, drinking and running in the product become themselves a part of the myth experience.160

The power of branding to unite people with brands through either Holt’s myth building scenario, or his own preferred version of story telling, debases for Twitchell the value assigned to art. Famous artworks for him have become clichés most notably the Mona Lisa, American Gothic, Washington Crossing the Delaware, Whistler’s Mother, along with artists such as Claude Monet, , Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne and Vincent Van Gogh.

157 Betsky, Aaron. Icons Magnets of Meaning, Chronicle Books, USA, 1997, p.13-14 158 Ibid, p.26 159 Ibid, p.31 160 Holt, B. Douglas. How Brands Become Icons, The Principles of Cultural Branding, HBS, 2004, p.8 72

They have become brands of what he calls ‘Museumworld’, the odds and ends that are habitually collected by visitors in the gift shops of museums such as wash cloths, paper weights, key chains, shopping bags and mouse pads.161 Twitchell finds that the museum has been placed in a position where they are forced to pander to the public to keep as in retail stores the turnstiles turning. The public when visiting superstar museums expect to see the superstar works, such as the French impressionist Claude Monet’s and his works water lilies and haystacks. This for him is the museum being trapped by its own brand story playing just another jingle.162

For Twitchell at the heart of all visiting experiences to Museumworld, is the prize of originality and a brand name, he notes:

Art is the story we tell about an object and getting the object into the museum is an important part of the story. Perhaps that’s why the museum and the machine develop concurrently. They depend on each other. If the machine says, let’s make the same thing over and over, the museum says let’s not.163

Having experienced the commercial side of advertising, it is not difficult to see how such approaches have now been implemented into the arts, especially when the public have become conditioned by brands that have developed by the narrative of stories. It is in this place between the gallery and retail shelves that artists such as Warhol saw the future, where art was sold and viewed as any other commodity demanding attention in an already over- saturated market.

For me, this is why Warhol’s work, such as his Campbell’s Soup cans series, is so influential because the line that designated difference from the high to the low, from the shelf to the gallery wall, began to disappear.

It was, as Don Thompson describes, a change in how art would be seen again or, as he says:

You would never see an ad in the same way, ever again. The soup cans were the beginning of the artistic concept of commodification.164

161 Twitchell, B. James. Branded Nation, Simon and Schuster, Rockefeller Center, NY, 2004, p.210 162 Ibid, p.210 163 Ibid, p.211 164 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.82 73

So, depending on your position to art and advertising, both have become a seamless joined entity who help promote each other’s interests through profiting from a branded story. The importance of Warhol’s art in reflecting the changes in attitudes towards the commercial nature of the arts was clearly present when he made such comments as, “All department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores”.165

It has taken more than just Warhol to condition the public to seeing objects on gallery shelves as more or less retail products branded at the high end of the market. Marketing and advertising companies have also played their part, using the same tools of narration and myth building as the arts but with a more cognitive approach that demands and tracks results. To better explain how the consumer views an object in an art gallery through branded vision, we need to look at the persuasive power and success of one of the most successful brand products in the world today – Coca-Cola – which has built as all successful brands do a connection to the consumer that goes beyond the monetary value of dollars and cents. Advertisers do this by building relationships between the brand myth identity and the customer.

This connection builds a brand myth identity with customers, while forging tight emotional connection to the brand. The emotional construct is relatively recent to marketing strategy. Two figures that were key to this development emerged in the 1970s. Their names were Al Ries and Jack Trout. They published an exposition in the magazine ‘Ad Age’ which expanded into a best-selling book, Positioning the Battle for Your Mind. Holt recognises the importance of emotional connection in building iconic brands or use of the ‘mind-share principles’, as he describes them. He divides these principles into three business brand models that are in wide use today — mind-share branding, emotional branding, and viral branding.166

These ‘mind share’ approaches will not however create and sustain an iconic brand. To do this, Holt believes a new approach is required which he termed cultural branding. The difference between mind-share and cultural branding is that mind share is a quantitative approach, which demands marketers and strategists track and measure the brand’s success. In cultural branding, the brand must sit within a deeper historical context as a player within the society itself. It creates the brand’s myth through cultural expression by addressing social issues and concerns currently held within a culture.167

165 Twitchell, B. James. Branded Nation, Simon and Schuster, Rockefeller Center, NY, 2004, p.227 166 Holt, B. Douglas. How Brands Become Icons, Business School Publishing Corporation, 2004, p.14 -15 167 Ibid, p.37 74

Only a very tiny percentage of brands ever achieve iconic status. Examples are Apple, Nike, Harley, VW, and Coke. As an example of the differences between the mind share and the cultural branding approach to iconic development, Holt cites the Coca-Cola company and brand. Originally released as a nerve tonic and hangover cure, Coca-Cola would be transformed through savvy public and advertising relations during World War II to the status of an iconic brand. Coke was shipped to the front lines during the war years, as stories circulated from servicemen through letters sent home and media of how much they missed the dark beverage. Through this act, Coke would be elevated to symbolise the war effort and American culture. This had become more than a drink – now it stood for democracy, freedom and what America was fighting for – national solidarity.168

This emotional bond continued after the war until social change in the turbulent sixties. Identity, myth and emotional ties that were forged on battlefields, now would be tested within the ‘mindfields’ of a new, emerging modern America.

National pride now shifted into a new America of government-subsidised suburbia and large multinational corporations. Coke brand myth identity was beginning to wear thin as America entered the 1960s. A disenchanted youth culture became decidedly unhappy with middle- class values and an extremely unpopular war in Vietnam. Coke was undergoing what Holt calls ‘cultural disruption’. This demonstrates his theory that when disruptive vibrations are felt in national culture, the myth itself will suffer consequences unless a brand can reinvent itself.169

What was required was a television commercial that could reinvent the Coke cultural myth. The company needed to sense the market once more and re-convert into its cultural identity. A commercial was undertaken and began with two fresh-faced girls on a hilltop in Italy. The music voiceover sung the words, “I’d like to buy the world a home, and furnish it with love…”. As the camera panned back, individuals from all countries and nationalities were singing in unison on the hillside with ever increasing numbers rushing to join the chorus and swell the numbers. Coke had become not just an ad, but an anthem of peace. Each person held a Coke bottle singing as a united soft drink choir. “I’d like to buy the world a Coke, and keep it company.”

168 Holt, B. Douglas. How Brands Become Icons, Business School Publishing Corporation, 2004, p.22 169 Ibid, p.23 75

Consumers were not just simply enjoying a Coke – they were healing racial, generational, political and gender divides. Americans embraced the myth completely with the added bonus of a re-release of the original song and lyrics that promptly went to number one.170

A decade later, the ability to sense and articulate cultural concerns and reinforce strong emotional connections appeared with a campaign centred on American football icon and Hall of Famer, “Mean Joe Greene”.

The ad centres on the Pittsburgh footballer as he leaves the stadium after a game. As he approaches the tunnel, a small boy says, “do you need any help? Greene is unresponsive, ignoring the boy while still continuing towards the locker room. Unfazed, the kid comments, “Do you … want my Coke?” “No, no”, Greene says. The boy responds, “Really, you can have it”. Greene stops, reaches for the bottle, puts the drink to his lips and promptly downs the entire bottle, parched after the game. The boy says nothing and begins to walk off. Joe shouts to him, “Hey, kid”. Greene’s face lights up and he tosses his game jersey to the boy. “Wow! Thanks Mean Joe!” Coke has thereby elevated itself above football and brands, to align with universal values of compassion and empathy within humanity.

At the time of this ad, there was increasing racial unrest through media. Fear-mongering saw “whites” begin to foster an idea of ever-increasing danger from “black” African-Americans within poor districts and ghettos. So, by using a high profile African-American footballer that shows a compassionate act to a small white boy, a gesture of racial harmony and co-existence is conveyed, even if it’s only to consolidate the integrity of a brand such as Coke. Through building its brand platform, Coke advertisements attempt to convey that through the simple enjoyment and sharing of a Coke, any social obstacle or differences can be overcome. It is plugging into America’s cultural pride and patriotism, which involves tackling any diversity that comes its way. These ads would turn out to be a winning strategy and a firm base from which to grow their brand identity into the future. However, Holt points out that as Coke moved forward, important strategic elements of myth and social values were being left behind. From the beginning of the 1980s, Coke failed to engage with social issues that had been utmost in the minds of brand consumers. It had fallen into the strategies of mind-share and emotional branding, and came to rely on past records and cultural nostalgia shaped in the 1950s, even re-releasing the old classic bottle design in glass and plastic.171 Coke had forgotten its secret to success. Holt, notes:

170 Holt, B. Douglas. How Brands Become Icons, Business School Publishing Corporation, 2004, p.24 171 Ibid, p.25 76

It didn’t compel its customers to form an emotional bond by airing generic emotional communications. Many sappy ads intended to pull at the audiences heartstrings come and go with little fanfare. Rather, Coke developed these emotional ties just like other iconic brands. The right identity myth, well performed, provides the audience with little epiphanies – moments of recognition that put images and sounds and feelings on barely perceptible desires. Customers who find this kind of identity value in brand forge intensive emotional connections. Emotional attachment is the consequence of great myth.172

If this type of approach in cultural branding is implemented, customers will buy the product to participate in its stories. The distinctive brand features, such as logos, design and colour, are the touchstones through which customers connect to the brand story and identify with the myth it sells.173

As well as stories, branding establishes the consumer good as a commodity sign – which opens up the process of the commodity sign’s communicative potential. This in turn leads to increasing focus not only on branding, but consumer taste, status, design, consumer identity projects, aesthetisation of everyday life. It is, simply put, a force in creating consumer culture.174

So this is where art now finds itself on show another brand to be consumed into the identity of individual and the public alike. Making up one of the many elements that people project into the world of consumer culture to declare where they sit on the ladder of taste and status. Twitchell remarks that Pop artists seemed to know this truth and that the real power in the art world was not museums and curators but corporate marketers who operated on the 25th floor of the Phillip Morris Building. Today, the convergence between art and commerce is on display for all to see. Museum openings, says Twitchell, are becoming like Hollywood premiers, complete with promos and glitz. They are, he says, “building the brand”.175

We only need to look at the late 1990’s and the Brooklyn Museum, says Twitchell, for an example of this convergence, where the museum had rented out its galleries to the dealer and collector Charles Saatchi, who had brought across from London the exhibit called ‘Sensation’, a collection of Young British Artists from the Saatchi collection. Why offer

172 Holt, B. Douglas. How Brands Become Icons, Business School Publishing Corporation, 2004, p.28 173 Ibid, p.36 174 Heilbrunn, B. Brand Culture, Routledge, UK, 1998, p.47 175 Twitchell, B. James. Branded Nation, Simon and Schuster, Rockefeller Center, NY, 2004, p.240-241 77

Saatchi a space for his show, simple to give legitimacy and increase the value of his collection along with the fact that the show was sponsored by the auction house Christies. Ultimately he sold the works back onto the market at a later date, this was brand building where all parties benefit or, as Twitchell says, a case of quid pro quo.176

This is how brands are built and maintained. It is an ongoing process, be it the artist with their celebrity name and profile to maintain, or museums such as the Brooklyn or Tate Modern in London, the goal is awareness. In the case of the Tate Modern, which once saw life as a power station, we see a showcase in point of how to leverage the brand through logo’s and symbolism. A visit here should be remembered not by having an art experience, but a Tate one.

Before entering the gallery spaces, Twitchell says the visitors are funnelled past cafes and bookstores. Everywhere you look is the Tate logo and everything you buy has it on it. The separation between art and commerce doesn’t exist. Twitchell says, you don’t go into a restaurant; the restaurant is in there with the art, and vice versa. The Tate has followed and applied the advice and laws of marketing, to move to a level that sees it now as being iconic in status; some would say the final and ultimate prize of brand identity and awareness.177

176 Twitchell, B. James. Branded Nation, Simon and Schuster. Rockefeller Center, NY, 2004, p.241 177 Ibid, p.244 78

CHAPTER 4: FAME, DEATH, BRANDS AND AUCTIONS

According to Tyler Cowen from the book, ‘What Price Fame,’ brands and fame share something in common, that is the importance of a name. There is, he says, not much fame or brand names attached to buying ordinary house nails, but a compact disc is another matter. When a compact disc is purchased, it is done so not by a consumer, but a fan. This is because, a fan makes a purchase not driven by quality and packaging considerations, but by the artists name blazoned across the front of the CD cover. Fame, like brands, carries economic uses for Cowan; they are not for him however useful for judging moral ideas, or for the more difficult tasks of trying to separate merit from fame, or merit from the brand.178

This is why we have, according to Cowen, ‘gatekeeper’ critics. Individuals or groups who present popular culture to the fans and consumers alike by sorting out the low from the high in terms of quality control, Cowen sees the role of the gatekeeper as more than just a job of quality control, when he states:

Gatekeeper critics serve as the societal guardians of long-term renown. These well-established conservative institutions guard entrance into canons and pantheons of achievement. Examples of gatekeeper critics include Nobel Prize committees, academic literary critics, museums, and Halls of Fame. They designate some stars as of especially high quality and promote those recommendations to fans. Gatekeeper critics endorse performers to cement and extend their own critical reputations. If the chosen performers do well, the certifying critic will enjoy increased stature, wider influence, and augmented income. Gatekeeper critics therefore look for quality and historical importance when evaluating performers, at least relative to the emphasis favoured by praise for sale.179

The Gatekeeper critic also fulfils and maintains a critical eye across the art markets from the dealer to the auction house and museum. High levels of quality must be maintained even if it seems, in monetary value, a disproportionate assessment of merit comes from the brand celebrity name.

John A Walker, from the book, ‘Art and Celebrity’, notes the modern obsession with artist celebrity as a general consensus by art historians began in the early Italian Renaissance. This

178 Cowen, Tyler. What Price Fame, University Press, p.58-59 179 Ibid, p.72-73 79

was due to the emergence of artists into a professional category rather than a guild of artisans. Figures that emerged and now have historical celebrity status are Brunelleschi, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael. Regarded as geniuses, their lives and celebrity status were given validation by Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) and his text, ‘Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects’ (1550). For Walker, texts such as Vasari, assisted in making the unknown name and signature status of the Renaissance artist, into one that became vitally important to both collectors and the art market alike.180

Walker is more than aware, that in the Renaissance, commercial gallery systems and media savvy art markets did not exist, driven by celebrity and brand names, as we know them now. Terms such as this only began to emerge nearing the end of the nineteenth century. A century, which closed with such artists as, Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gaugin, Vincent Van Gogh and Auguste Renoir, now being spoken of as art superstars. A shift had occurred where importance now lay not just in making art, but the artist. One group, who were quick in seeing artists as a new potential, were marketeers. Marketeers in tandem with the twentieth century assisted in taking relative unknown artists, such as Vincent Van Gogh, and turning them into brand icons that Walt Disney would have been proud of.

For marketeers be it an artist or a bar of soap, require a brand story to build from. For an artist such as Vincent Van Gogh it was not a case of making new spin, but containing what was already spun – a life of struggle, his mysterious mental attacks, the mutilation of his own body and finally his death by suicide. For the Gatekeepers, a brand name such as Van Gogh has immense monetary rewards. Apart from the acquisitions for museums and canvases sold at auction for unimaginable prices there are, as Walker points out, travelling exhibitions, reproductions, posters, postcards, magazine articles, illustrated books, serious art historical monographs and fictionalised biographies, editions of his letters, Hollywood biopics, editions of his letters a Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, cinema and television documentaries, cartons, a popular song, plays, acts of homage by other artists – such as the yellow-hued psychedelic-style poster of Vincent designed by Martin Sharp – all combined to make Van Gogh world famous, even in countries as culturally distant to Europe as Japan.181

Merchandising, movies, and books, can all help in assisting or enlarging stories attached to brands as Van Gogh or his modern contemporary, Damien Hirst. This may, however, create a saturated media and celebrity presence that can distract from the merit and true artistic worth associated with their art. Separating the Brand Celebrity Person from the paint can be a

180 Walker, John A. Art and Celebrity, Pluto Press, London, p.193-194 181 Ibid, p.194-195 80

difficult task as Tyler Cowen mentioned in reference to separating merit from fame, or merit from the brand. The brand artist celebrity can become far more than just the managing and staging their work. It is the operating and running of a company built around the artists name, involving in some cases as Hirst a studios of assistants, PR people, dealers, agents, and the occasional product endorsement.

Don Thompson, from the book, ‘The $12 Million Stuffed Shark’, says that at age 42, Damien Hirst has become more famous, richer, and maybe more powerful than any other living artist. For Thompson Hirst poses many questions in regard to the brand celebrity artist when he says:

Does Hirst command power and high prices because he is good, or because he is branded? Is he famous because of his work, because the shock value of his work holds public attention, because Charles Saatchi first made him famous with the high price reported for Physical Impossibility, or is he famous for being famous? Is he a social commentator who offers profound meditation on death and decay? No two critics would likely agree on the answers to these questions. What is clear is that Hirst’s work and his flair for marketing and branding cannot be ignored. His brand creates and his art brings in people who would never otherwise view contemporary art.182

Hirst’s celebratory fame was of course not the first, preceding him was what some consider the brand father of contemporary art, Andy Warhol. Andy was shot both metaphorically, and literally into the art world’s hall of fame at the beginning of the 1960’s, leaving a legacy that has continued to this day. The only difference between Hirst and Warhol is death and the distance of time.

As with Hirst, Warhol employed assistants in a studio arrangement referred to as “the factory”, to output a production line scenario. His most successful and widely known artworks pertaining to the factory period were silkscreen multiples. Warhol’s objective was to be ‘hands-free’, that is, being unable to distinguish between works he personally oversaw to work output by assistants. Some of the most famous work occurred in the mid sixties at places like the Stable Gallery, NewYork, in 1964. Tony Godfrey, writer and author who was present at some of the Warhol shows New York, remembers the impression they made when he looks back and says:

182 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.78 81

Brillo boxes (soap pads), Campbell’s boxes (tomato juice), delMonte boxes (peach halves) and Heinz boxes (tomato ketchup) – arrayed in mass profusion, stacked chaotically or in neat lines on the floor, as if the lorry from the factory had just made its delivery.183

For Godfrey, an exhibition by Warhol was not about how much effort or input he had. It was about selling and promoting the brand name of Warhol. An example of this for Godfrey is the Warhol retrospective show which he attended at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1965 and made this comment regarding:

All the work was removed for the opening; so many guests were expected that this became an exhibition not of art, but of an exhibition. The only thing on show was Andy Warhol being famous. Was this all that art and exhibiting were ultimately about – the fifteen minutes of fame that he had anticipated for everyone in the future?184

Warhol’s future and life came to an end suddenly on 22 February 1987 in the early hours of the morning from complications due to gall bladder surgery. Warhol had spent his life making himself into the public brand persona that everyone knew. He was an artist with a rockstar lifestyle who decided when and for whom he would make art. Now in the wake of his death, the decisions and legacy of his brand name and art would fall to the responsibility of others and the market 185 – a market that paid no more than $50,000 for a work when he was alive, the exception being some earlier works, which had made their way to auction.186

Warhol understood the power of branding. The packaging of a Brillo box or his own androgynous look, complete with wigs, was about maintaining an image. The image we present or leave behind fascinated Warhol so much that he produced a series of silkscreens late in 1962 dedicated to iconic celebrities. These included Elvis Presley, Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe – frozen in time immortals available in a series of multi-colours and slightly blurred effects.

183 Godfrey Tony, Conceptual Art. Phaidon Press, London, 1998,1999, p.96 184 Ibid, p.96 185 Alexander, Paul. Death and Disaster, The Rise of the Warhol Empire, Random House, 2006 p.76 186 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.85 82

So important was this series in the signatory style of the Warhol brand that in the 1970’s, when his popularity was waning, he turned to commissioned silkscreen portraits to subsidise his Factory. The fee per commission was $25,000 and involved a little artistic licence on Warhol’s part to create an idealised image of the sitter. The relevance of the silkscreen portraits for author Don Thompson (In his book “The $12 Million Stuffed Shark”) is to be found in an interview he held with friend and collegue of Warhol, Chris Makos.

Makos transcribed that Warhol’s faces underwent cosmetic enhancement such as facelifts and nose jobs when he says to Thompson:

I don’t know if Mrs Dusselfdorf knew she was getting Liza Minnelli’s lips but they sure made her look better. His commercial portraits were derided by other artists, but gave his clients idealized images of themselves

Warhol signed the work when the client picked it up in the studio, beside celebrity portraits of Mick Jagger, Liza Minnelli and Rudolf Nureyev. The word of mouth promotion that resulted produced more commissions. Warhol completed a thousand portraits in his career, more than the lifetime output of many artists, each work took about a day to complete. His portrait fee rose to $40,000 in the 1980’s.187

The celebrity brand power of an image to grow in stature long after the person had gone was not lost on Warhol and the body of silkscreen works he left behind, or in his last public statement, “Death means a lot of money, death makes you a star”.188

Warhol knew if a celebrity dies their branding does not, just the opposite in fact. As proof of this, his pulling and selling power that he created while he was alive, continued to grow long after his death with his most popular works being those made between 1962 and 1967 – soup cans, celebrities, disasters and self portraits. Don Thompson believes these works are widely regarded as genius, responsible for altering the course of modern art. As an indicator of his growing status, the ‘Orange Marilyn’ (1964) silkscreen was sold by Sotheby’s in 1998 for $17.3 million. Three other works had sold privately for between $25 and $28 million. In May 1970, his prices inflated immensely. “Green Car Crash’ was offered by Christies New

187 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.82-83 188 Ibid, p.86 83

York, with an estimate of $25-$35 million, and sold for $71.7 million - four times the previous record for a Warhol.189

Prices such as these endorse that, with the right star brand power, death can be a very lucrative business. In Warhol’s case, a great part of his death success has been due to the control of his brand name and his work, managed by the Warhol Foundation. Established by Warhol’s business partner and friend Fred Hughes, the Foundation was set up to run as if Andy was still alive. Hughes, more than anyone else (other than Warhol) had contributed to the brand identity and success of Warhol’s Factory. A success that Hughes wished to see continued, through the legacy of making the foundation financially independent.

By 1990, through the help of appointed Estate lawyer, Ed Hayes, Hughes had generated $25 million in cash with another $10 million held in estate. Hughes goal was simple, make the Foundation financially independent by establishing a trust fund that contained the amount of at least a $100 million dollars within it.190 All this was to change, however, in March 1990 when Hughes made the extraordinary decision to step down due to his declining ill health. A decision some thought, that had been exasperated by the in-fighting and bickering which had developed between Hughes and Hayes. Hughes now needed someone to fill the role of foundation president and continue on with his financial legacy. The choice was a part-time consultant at the foundation named Arch Gillies.191

Hughes saw this as a chance to take a back seat role in the running of the Foundation and allow Gillies to run the show for a while. To Gillies this appointment was much more than that, for him this was the job opportunity of a lifetime, so much so that once appointed he had no intent of relinquishing it - a position made clear to Hughes only after Gillies had accepted the role along with the Foundation’s support. For Hughes, this had more ramifications than a job loss. This could affect his whole financial future. Why? – Because whoever controlled the Warhol Foundation had input into appraising its value. This was a value that impacted on Hughes directly due to the fact that, under New York State law, he was entitled as executor to 2% of the Estate’s worth along with Hayes. Before this could happen however, there was the step of establishing the value of the Warhol Estate from the position of the foundation. For until a figure was agreed on, neither Hughes nor Hayes, could receive a cent. This had become more than just about money, they were fighting for the principle of the matter, and all the work they had done in establishing the Foundation in the first place. A Foundation that

189 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.84 190 Alexander, Paul. Death and Disaster. The Rise of the Warhol Empire, Random House, p.246 191 Ibid, p.144 84

they believed, presided over an estate worth, $600 million dollars, entitling both men to $12 million dollar cheques respectively.192

Gillies disagreed, he took the position that the Estate was substantially worth a lot less, and as neither side was willing to comprise, negotiations for remuneration ground to a halt. Gillies’ desire to devalue the estate was clearly the opposite stance of Hughes and Hayes, it still however, was rooted in money. This was because by Law on a yearly basis the Foundation was required to give away 5% of the Estate value. So if valued at $600 million, the Foundation would be forced to give away a cheque of $30 million annually– a figure impossible for them to meet. Secondly, Gillies was all too aware of the 2% deduction fee that would be owed to Hughes and Hayes, an amount which for his own personal reasons he was unwilling to see them get. Gillies, to validate his and the foundation’s position towards a low estimate, would now require a professional valuation from an auction house to ascertain the estate’s worth. He took upon himself to arrange meetings with representatives from the auction house, Christies, to work out an agreement that could be beneficial to all parties concerned. This agreement took the form a blockage discount being applied to any future consignments between the Warhol estate and Christies.193

In the book, ‘Death and Disaster’, Paul Alexander, explains the meaning of ‘blockage discount”:

One of the more nebulous concepts in the art business, it is essentially a mechanism by which an appraiser can put almost any price he wants on a piece of work since blockage discounts can range from 5 to 90 percent (or more) and the application of that discount is usually decided solely by the appraiser. An appraiser, for example, may value a work at a million dollars, but if the piece of art is to be sold in a block of work by the same artist, the appraiser can reduce the appraised value of the million dollar painting to as little as one hundred thousand dollars – or less.194

By 1 May 1991, Christies had evaluated and appraised the Warhol Estate, at a figure of $92 million, this included paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints and photographs.195 Hayes, who had not been a part of these meetings held with Christies, believed this figure for obvious

192 Alexander, Paul. Death and Disaster. The Rise of the Warhol Empire, Random House, p.53 193 Ibid, p.153 194 Ibid, p.167 195 Ibid, p.170 85

reasons to be incorrect. Relations between Hayes, Gillies and the Foundation became strained, until in early 1992 when Gillies with the support of the Foundation had Hayes removed from any controlling interest in the Estate. With payments of $4.85 million and $1.6 million paid to Hayes so far, and another $7.5 million owing, he knew there would be only one way of now achieving a complete settlement, and that was in Court. On 11 June 1992, with the support of Hughes, he filed an SCPA 2110 and payment of fees against the Foundation.196

On 17 November 1993, six years after Warhol’s death, the Right Honorable Eve Preminger finally presided over the case to ascertain the value of Andy Warhol and his Estate.197 This for Preminger would be more than a civil case; she had been placed in a position to judicate on the value and worth of the brand artist celebrity – Warhol. A value that now saw Hayes and Hughes, pushing for the estate to be worth $708 million, and Gillies and the Foundation on Christie’s advice, $95 million. At the core of the trial was how did Christies arise at a figure of $95 million in the first place. Through many witnesses and cross-examinations, it was revealed as a part of the Foundation’s blockage discount deal, Christie’s had also been appointed as sole auctioneer for a selected group of Warhol works. Works estimated by Christies to be worth, on the market, around $60 million dollars. Preminger found this puzzling, as Christies had appraised the entire Warhol art collection with a blockage discount at only $95 million.198

For Preminger in the end, the valuation was in the artist. Preminger comments:

Warhol is an artist of international prominence. He is widely recognised as one of the world’s most important and influential artists. His work has been exhibited and sold throughout the United States and the world … more people visited the Warhol retrospective [in 1989 at MOMA] than those visiting the major exhibition at MOMA of Picasso, Braque or Matisse.199

In regard to Christies, Preminger said, “they failed to consider the importance of Warhol as an artist, which is relevant to his staying power and marketability”. She also found Hayes’ figures and experts not wholly objective either, but on the whole more reliable in their appraisals.

196 Alexander, Paul. Death and Disaster, The Rise of the Warhol Empire, Random House, p.182 197 Ibid, p.210 198 Ibid, p.194-195 199 Ibid, p.243 86

Taking all this into consideration, Preminger valued Warhol’s art with what she regarded as an appropriate Blockage Discount: Photographs $84 million 20% discount + $64 million Paintings sculptures $311,708,800 20% discount $249,367,040 drawings $29,525,000 35% discount $45,500,000 Prints $48, 037,238. Preminger concluded with a transfer date value of $390,979,278 and non-art assets of $119 million the fair market price of the Estate is $509,979,278. 200

After the trial, Gillies retained his position as Foundation president but with a lot less money at his disposal. At the start of appointment in 1990, there was a $25 million surplus, by 1994, less than $6 million. Warhol’s Estate was assessed by an individual outside of the art world and she deemed that because of his name and the importance it held within the art world, that any works belonging to or created from him to be of great monetary value. In terms of branding, Preminger as a representative of the Crown has recognised that fame, at least in the art world, does carry a price on its head, which increases exponentially with the size of the brand name.

Preceding the Court case settlement, the Foundation decided to move to a permanent site in Pittsburgh, and open . The official opening for both fans, and the viewing public alike, took place on Saturday, 14 May 1993 at midnight.201 Included within the collection are 4,100 paintings and sculptures, some of which are now considered Warhol’s finest works, such as the ‘Disaster Series’.

To manage the brand name and authenticity of artworks both within and out of the Museum, the Foundation created an authentication board. It seems that in death, Warhol’s own past pertaining to his work ethics, have become a liability to the brand name he created. When alive, Warhol produced mass print and silkscreen runs of his favourite subjects such as ‘Little Electric Chair” of which there are 50 known paintings to exist, out of a series of 100. What faces the authenticity board is, did Warhol see and approve the work, and does it have what Don Thompson calls the ‘presence of the artist’.

As a testimony to how valuable the brand name of Warhol has become, a class action anti- trust lawsuit was filed against the Warhol Estate, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the visual arts and the authentication board in July 2007, regarding authenticity. The work at the centre of the dispute is a 1964 Warhol self-portrait owned by Joe Simon-Wheeler. Wheeler claims

200 Alexander, Paul. Death and Disaster, The Rise of the Warhol Empire, Random House, p.243-244 201 Ibid, p.250 87

the board had rejected the artwork on at least two occasions, even though he had the work authenticated by Warhol’s partner and manager, Frederick Hughes. The Foundation is being accused of monopolizing the market and as it is a class action, other Warhol owners may join in a single lawsuit if they wish. If they lose, the Foundation and authentication board could face damage claims that could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. From the position of Warhol’s name, another Court case or lawsuit as this will not diminish his brand standing in the art world, if anything it will make it even more iconic as the stories of the man and his work continue to grow in fame.202

Warhol would be happy to know that, even long after his death, his brand name was still pulling crowds and controversy in high profile lawsuits. It would seem that he was all too aware of the implications that could unfold after his death on the subject of value and authenticity. Why else would he have been so obsessive over keeping diaries and carrying a camera everywhere to capture and record every aspect of himself? An obsession that revealed after his death, that he had accumulated some 4,000 tape-recorded phone calls, interviews, mailings, invitations, magazines, books, clippings, newspapers and ephemera. As if to drive home the importance of this collection against his art practices, Warhol dated and placed each object within some 600 boxes, yet he couldn’t or wouldn’t stamp or sign large quantities of artworks that were produced within his factory.203

Warhol practiced the art of celebrity. What he made, looked like, and said became facets of the brand name, he achieved this by marketing himself through the stories he created around his own persona. Stories which have continued, along with his brand name of fame, to become more valuable in death than life. Warhol’s life and death shows that the creation of a brand continues to grow in tandem with their fame long after the physical presence of its creator has gone.

FAME I HAD THE IDEA HIRST

From a deceased brand celebrity artist to one that is living, no one has probably carried and ran with the torch of fame after Warhol than Damien Hirst. Fame seems to sit comfortably on Hirst’s shoulders, but there are a great many factors than just him, that put it there. It has required an input and association from many varied sources such as marketing and media. All celebrities and movie stars know if there’s no media interest surrounding them, there’s

202 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.83 203 Walker, John A. Art and Celebrity, Pluto Press, London, p.218 88

usually no work opportunities either. Brands are dependent on good public awareness and relationships. Looking at Warhol’s life and profile of celebrity, it shows that fame is and was a factor in assessing the value of him as a brand. In my discussion on aesthetic value, branding an artifact required the endorsement of the art world. Brands are a cocktail of ingredients and factors that must be blended together correctly to achieve the required taste.

For artists, achieving this blend can be artwork in itself, involving media stunts and self- promotion. This is about presenting a brand cocktail with a unique flavour and mix that encapsulates the artist’s identity. One such artist, who exemplifies the art of selling yourself, and has already been briefly mentioned, is Tracy Emin. Born in London in 1963, Emin grew up in the down-market seaside resort of Margate. Openly candid, Emin has built a reputation on revealing every sordid detail in regard to her life. A life that pulls from a seemingly deep well of despair which has included sexual assault at 13, underage sex, abortions, anorexia, miscarriage, depression, attempted suicide, bouts of excessive drinking, smoking and ill health.204

Like her contemporary, Damien Hirst, Emin understands the power and manipulative qualities of the media and takes this knowledge with her into the making and planning of her work. An example of this is the work titled, ‘Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made’ or aka, ‘The Swedish Room’ sold by Christies in 2001 for £108,250. The work involved Emin living inside the installation in 1996 for two weeks while naked. Enclosed walls had been drilled with viewing holes to allow visitors to the gallery of Andreas Brandstrom, Stockholm to participate in a type of cheap peep sex show. The aim of the work was to watch Emin overcome a six-year painting block. To do this, Emin pulled upon her knowledge of art by referencing Yves Klein’s ‘Anthropometry’ performance, which made use of the naked figure as a painting tool to make gestures upon a canvas. Purchased by Charles Saatchi, some thought he purchased only half a work, as the performance aspect could attain no price tag. Saatchi’s faith however in Emin was quickly justified, as he must have already suspected due to the high media attention that the show attracted both the status and price of all Emin’s work shot up in value. As did other stunts which included Emin imitating other famous works such as Munch’s ‘Scream’ by standing naked in an Oslo field doing what else but screaming.205

Soon under attack as just a media whore, the fame genie was out of the box. Emin was now starting to be seen as a brand celebrity. Other brands could now see potential in trading off

204 Walker, John A. Art and Celebrity, Pluto Press, London, p.248-249 205 Ibid, p.253 89

Emin’s artistic profile through mutual cross-branding association and promotions. Two high profile names to do just that were, British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, and the British Museum.

For the British Museum, the request was for Emin to host an event for an accompanying exhibition on Cleopatra 2001. From the British Museum perspective, it was arguably one of the most famous and notorious brand names of antiquity, being introduced by a modern day equivalent – maybe just a little less famous. For Vivienne Westwood, the request was to fashion clothes on a catwalk in Paris.206

In the book, ‘The Art of Tracy Emin’, Greedy Kunst expresses the meaning of Westwood as a brand icon:

A Vivienne Westwood dress is an extraordinary object of an ordinary desire. Designer clothing was at the forefront of the consumer booms of the 1980’s and 1990’s. A new type of retaining was developed based on greater market segmentation of goods, but ongoing concentration of capital, with increased speed and flexibility of distribution, designed to overcome crises in the realisation of value (overproduction). Central to this new regime of accumulation in the consumer goods sector is an intensification of the integration of the fashion, advertising and entertainment industries and a renewed emphasis on branding. Labels such as Vivienne Westwood in the up-market, more rarefied zoning of branding function to help define branding itself as the offer of ostensibly ‘quality goods for all’.207

Emin embraces cross-promotion branding as if it is a part of her artistic aura – an aura that grows and changes by mixing with other rich and famous brands.

The aura surrounding a brand or celebrity is hard to quantify in artistic terms, in the music industry it is sometimes referred to as the X factor. Andy Warhol from the book, ‘The Philosophy of Andy Warhol’, was once approached to sell his ‘aura’. They were clear they didn’t want his products they wanted to buy his aura. Warhol couldn’t understand exactly what they wanted but it was clear they were prepared to pay a lot for it. He thought if it was worth paying for, he should try and find out what it was. He came to think of it as the way a

206 Walker, John A. Art and Celebrity, Pluto Press, London, p.254 207 Merck, Mandy. Townsend, Chris. (Editors) The Art of Thames and Hudson, 2002, p.55 90

stranger who has never been around or met you before, seeing you only as the media persona, as opposed to family and friends who see and work with you every day.208

Whatever draws Emin into cross-promotional branding, be it fame, money, celebrity, increased brand awareness, she has continued to participate in Advertising promotions. An example of this is the product Bombay Gin, which showed her face next to a bottle of Bombay Gin, with the caption, ‘Bad Girls Like Bombay Gin’. This was followed up in 2000 by posing nude for Becks Beer. Both ads were devoid of any reference to Emin’s name only her image was displayed to show that she truly had arrived as a brand icon on the artistic stage.209

Other companies have capitalised on her artwork directly, as with the Paris luggage label, Longchamp, which pulled from her series of hand-stitched and embroidered works such as the tent entitled, ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With’, which had stitched inside the tent every past lover up until the work’s completion. Longchamp stitched onto their handbags, ‘special editions of course’, Emin’s catch phrases such as, ‘Me Every Time’, ‘You Said You Love Me’ and ‘Moments of Love’.210

Emin’s branded profile has risen through dealer corporate and media association but before walking the catwalks of Paris, her most important association lay with a group of art students known as YBA’s Young British Artists. The main core of the YBA’s came from London and the art college of Goldsmiths. From the mid-eighties through to the late nineties, the YBAs came to dominate both the London and International art scene. Wherever the YBAs showed, a media scrum usually followed. Four standards were the ‘Brilliant’ New Art from London, held at the Walher Art Centre, Minneapolis 1995, ‘Full House’ at the Kuntsmuseum Wolfsburg Germany 1996, ‘Live Life’ at the Musee d’Art Moderne, de la Ville de Paris 1996 and ‘Sensation’ at the , London 1997.211

Why were they so successful? For Julian Stallabrass, author of High Art Life, it was because UK artists had become interested in representing the concerns of mass culture, and contemporary ‘real life’. Stallabrass states:

208 Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Published by the Penguin Group, 1975, 2007, p.77 209 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.90-91 210 Ibid, p.92 211 Muir, Gregor. Lucky Kunst. The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, Published by Aurum, 2009, p.132 91

These concerns were largely seen through media eyes, as they had to be, for an appeal to a wide audience could only be mounted through the media, and success would be measured largely by media visibility.212

The emergence of the YBAs goes back nineteen years to student shows organised, curated and run by Goldsmith College graduates. One student more than any other, is seen as instrumental to their success, and also happens to feature heavily within this paper, Damien Hirst. While still studying, Hirst and his fellow students had been able to view the latest international and American art, at the privately owned and run in London. (The owner, Charles Saatchi, is discussed further on). The gallery showcased American art, including the show, ‘New York Art Now’ (1987-1988) featuring Americans Jeff Koons, Peter Halley, Phillip Taaffe, Robert Gober and Ashley Bickerton, to name a few. One artist from the group, who may have stood out as an inspiration for Hirst, was Jeff Koons. Artists such as this would have impressed, not just by the content, and subject of the material displayed, but by other values, such as presentation and artistic promotion.213

Hirst did not have to wait long before applying what he had seen, in 1988, in an empty administrative block, he staged his first group show ‘Freeze’. Among some of the artists showing were , , , , Anya Gallacio, Damien Hirst, , , , Richard Patterson, Simon Patterson and .214

In keeping with what he had admired in the New York Art Now show, Hirst and the other organisers mounted the most professional show they could afford with the intention of attracting people who carried weight within the art world such as from the Tate Gallery and from the Royal Academy. This was done through acquiring mailing lists of established arts organizations and producing gallery quality catalogues, so even if the memory of the work itself faded, the documentation hopefully wouldn’t.215

Hirst and his co-Freeze collaborators were about to play a pivotal role in a newly emerging UK art scene. Hirst’s work in particular would come to both repel and excite the media and art world alike. Works such as, ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ (1991), which involved the displaying of a life size tiger shark in a large tank of

212 Stallabrass, Julian. Highartlite, The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, Publishers Verso, 1999, 2006, p.132 213 Tony, Godfrey. New York Art Now and other Exhibitions, Burlington Magazine, Dec 1987, p.822-824 214 Stallabrass, Julian. Highartlite, The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, Publishers Verso, 1999, 2006, p.53 215 Ibid, p.21-22 92

formaldehyde (213 x 518 x 213cm). Or the installation called, ‘In and Out of Love’ (1991), which displayed canvasses covered with butterfly chrysalises, that over time hatched, fed off sugared water, flew, bred, then died. These dead butterflies in turn were applied to painted canvases in an adjoining room to complete the piece. ‘A Thousand Years’ (1990), also used a large glass vitrine case split through the middle. One side of the case holds flies, on the other a dead rotting cow’s head and a fly zapper. The flies hatched and flew, attracted by the rotten meat, into the opposing side of the case where they had the choice to either feed or be fried.

Stallabrass comments that Hirst’s materials are only incidentally objects in the world, for they lived the greater part of their lives in the media. Does the shark really get us to think about mortality? Who’s really afraid of sharks rather than of cancer or of being run over? Or does it simply remind us of the movie, Jaws? Hirst’s impossible desires – to live forever – are caused, he thinks, by media images, magazines, TV advertising, shop windows, beautiful people and clothes.216

Hirst may be right. The illusions of beauty, happiness or glamour, are presented daily in the form of a media obstacle course that consumers must traverse if they are to gain eternal life and happiness. Gordon Burn considers the question, is Hirst trying to place himself somewhere between the media’s cracks of truth, as artist, ad man, illusionist, selling life and death in a glass bottle or vitrine case? Then Burn wonders, is this the contemporary art version of a travelling circus alluding to acts of the past, such as the bearded lady, or the two- headed, dog? Or ‘Hirst the Showman’, with an element of theatre, as if playing to a room full of Victorian decadents? 217

A great deal of Hirst’s work comprises the taking of singular or plural readymade objects and reconceptualizing them through placement and orientation in a gallery space. This reconceptualizing of readymade’s today is accepted as a normal part of art making and practice. Questions such as these may not even matter anymore, with the public happy to leave the decision of validity and value to dealers, curators and museums. The focus has shifted away from the artwork to the artist, to brand celebrity art, where the work gains value and profile only after the artist does? Stallabrass says the artist is no longer the font of expressive feeling, or a site of conflicting impulses, but rather a media image from which the work is not clearly separated. The outcome relies on the artist and their work being assigned a comparative value that increases over time in relation to their name and notoriety.218

216 Stallabrass, Julian. Highartlite, The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, Publishers Verso, 1999, 2006, p.26 217 Burn, Gordon. The Knives Are Out. Unlimited, Monday, 10 April 2000 218 Stallabrass, Julian. Highartlite, The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, Publishers Verso, 1999, 2006, p.32 93

At least in the case of Hirst, the brand celebrity profile can seen to be true. Hirst and his brand image of bad boy, artist, and celebrity, is just that. Stallabrass notes with Hirst’s work such as his Spin Painting series (which involved his assistants spinning circular disks while flinging different colours of household paints onto the surface) that the only clever thing about Hirst’s work is the exploitation of the market, the value, created and that his position to mount that exploitation is entirely due to his celebrity.219

Joan Gibbons in the book, Art and Advertising, believes that many artists today now owe their brand identity to the relationship with the media and advertisers, and the cult of celebrity is key to both artists and advertisers who wish to connect effectively with the public to sell their goods.220 For Hirst, a celebrity profile has meant huge financial rewards. In June 2007, Hirst exhibited his latest work, ‘’. The piece, exhibited at London’s gallery, was a diamond encrusted platinum skull, for sale with a price of £50 million. To date, and according to Jane Eckett, Director of Whyte’s, the Irish Fine Art Auctioneers, it is the most expensive artwork ever exhibited by a living artist. The skull is platinum, made from a cast of an eighteenth century man around his 30’s. Across the surface has been placed 8,601 ‘ethically sourced’ diamonds, one as large as 52.5 carats, bestowing a title by the press, ‘the Skull Star Diamond’. Once again, Hirst the showman divided the public and press alike – is it art to reflect an age of wealth, or pop art vulgarity?221

One aspect of Hirst’s work both critics and the public do agree on is his ongoing fascination with death. This latest work, ‘For the Love of God’, is an addition to this ongoing theme. Hirst commented on this fascination with the morbid in a series of interviews (begun in 2000) with the British writer, Gordon Burn:

When did death become the preoccupation it obviously is? Seeing people as disintegrating and decomposing even when they’re well and alive? It sounds really pessimistic … I think I’ve got an obsession with death, but I think it’s like a celebration of life, rather than something morbid. You can’t have one without the other.222

Hirst’s first contact or interest in death as a subject began in Leeds when he was sixteen and, through a friend who was in microbiology, gained access to the city morgue for reference

219 Stallabrass, Julian. Highartlite, The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, Publishers Verso, 1999, 2006, p.28 220 Gibbons, Joan. Art and Advertising, I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, London, 2005, p.135 221 Rosita Boland. Is this the Jewel in the Crown of Brit Art? Irish Times Ltd, 9 June 2007 222 Gordon, Burn. Guardian, Naked Hirst, Guardian News and Media Limited, Saturday October 6, 2007 94

drawing. This is where the new infamous photo of a grinning Hirst was taken next to a severed head.223 For Hirst, this shot summed up the problems that are posed between life and death. Burn asks Hirst whether he has ever held one of the dead bodies in the morgue:

Yeah, you have to get them out of the tank and everything. They’re for study. They’re in formaldehyde, and I’m going, “have you got any gloves?” – and the guy goes, “Oh no, you don’t need them, you’re not going to catch anything”. I’m getting him out of the cupboard to put him on the desk, and by the end of it, it was just… funny.224

For Stallabrass, Hirst may be confronting the theme of death and mortality but he is also expressing universal themes in traditional works of art. It is presented through advertising cliché’s both banal and instantly recognisable. The clichés soon become less about the content in the work and more about the artist himself. It is not just an exploration of life, and death, it is a media profile of the artist, Hirst.225

Damien Hirst’s approach and persona can be said to share, many characteristics to the late Andy Warhol, in that both have had the ability to spin and sell themselves as Celebrity artists. Hirst knows as Warhol did, every element, be it his comments, clothes, antics, develop a media profile. If Warhol was called androgynous, Hirst is a ‘hooligan genius’, ‘over-wrought degenerate’ and ‘art yobbo’. Where Warhol was aloof, Hirst has been outgoing, loud, drunk, and happy to expose himself in public along with his mates, arse and genitals.226

Creating a profile in media and advertising can be seen as beneficial to both the artist and advertiser when building brand identity. A case in point is the Absolute Vodka campaign. Started in 1985 when an American high profile celebrity art businessman approached Andy Warhol was to collaborate in creating a mutually beneficial ad that infused art and business. Warhol already had gone a long way to merge the worlds of art and business through his studio known as the Factory. The success of the campaign relied on the fact that Warhol was, and mixed with, celebrity. So began a procession of celebrity artists. Absolute Warhol in turn became another American artist Keith Haring. Haring developed a hard black outlined graphic style that incorporated one-dimensional figures into his work. This signature style was developed through tagging and street art on and around the New York underground.

223 Gibbons, Joan. Art and Advertising, I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, London, 2005, p.152 224 Gordon, Burn. Naked Hirst, Guardian Newspaper and Media Limited, Saturday October 6, 2007 225 Stallabrass, Julian. Highartlite, The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, Publishers Verso, 1999, 2006, p.31 226 Walker, John A. Art and Celebrity, Pluto Press, London, 2003, p.245 95

Like Warhol, Haring ran merchandise and branding shop of his work, known as the Pop Shop, in downtown New York. In respect of Haring and not to be seen as an exercise in just brand building, the launch of the ad was conducted at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in November 1986. The ongoing ads ran in upmarket society magazines as well as inside back covers of high profile art magazines such as Art Forum and Art in America every month from November 1988 to December 2002.227

The mix of art and advertising had proved to be an absolute success but it was not quite finished yet. It would feature the ‘new Warhol of the nineties’, the absolute bad boy of art, Damien Hirst. The image for the ad had the bottle of Vodka housed in a vitrine case which repeated with the first bottle now encasing a vitrine case with another bottle and so forth, into infinity. Hirst had become a brand himself with a signature style that came in the shape of a vitrine glass case. A campaign as this highlights there is not much difference between a branding campaign of a vodka bottle or with an artist within capitalist culture.

Hirst is of course not the only contemporary artist, who through either media or good luck has created a celebrity and signatory profile, another is British and fellow YBA artist . Like Hirst, success came relatively early, winning the high profile contemporary Turner Art Prize only six years out of College, followed by a large acquisition of his paintings by the Tate Gallery London in 2003, bestowing on him a prominent place within British Art.

His hook or signature style was initiated in a work entitled, ‘Painting with Shit on it’ (1993). As the work describes, shit is a key ingredient and also his trademark. Ofili does not use just any old shit but elephant dung balls obtained from zoos. The dung may be used as footstools to rest paintings on or in the work itself as pendants on breasts or penises. Ofili has made great effort in expanding his work and personal brand profile through the use of the elephant dung, even taking out an advertisement in the magazine, Frieze that read, ‘Elephant Shit’. The image showed Ofili smoking the dung as a ‘shit joint’.228

Whether we are moved or offended by the theatrics of Hirst and his passion for death or Ofili’s mixed symbolism of dung, creating a signatory style helps create an identity and profile within the media. This in turn creates brand awareness for the artist irrespective of whether the media coverage is favourable or not.

227 Gibbons, Joan. Art and Advertising, I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, London, 2005, p.142-145 228 Stallabrass, Julian. Highartlite, The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, (Frieze article was run on 10 May1993, Issue 10, The work addresses issues of racism through black/white stereotypes as in ‘Shithead’ (1993) that involved, a dung ball with some of the artist’s hair attached along with the teeth of a child.) Publishers, Verso, 1999, 2006, p.108-110 96

For auction houses, signature pieces or style mean more money on the auction floor. June 2007, Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Auction House sold a 2002 Hirst work entitled, ‘Lullaby Spring’ for £9.7 million (AUD22.8 million). This officially has made Hirst the World’s highest priced, currently living 41-year-old artist. The New York art dealer, Alberto Mugrabi, described Hirst as the leader of the art world after the Sotheby’s sale. “He’s young, he’s high-flying and he’s the best”. The work itself consisted of a 3-metre wide steel pill cabinet, which contained 6,136 hand crafted and painted pills, which cost a US buyer in 2002 £730,000.229

It would seem for Hirst, his work has become the sweet pill of success, which everyone in the art world it would seem, wants to consume. Only a couple of years after the sale of ‘Lullaby Spring’ a book was produced by the Tate, titled A-Gadda-Da-Vida’. In this publication Hirst has found becoming the art world’s pill of choice, has an unfortunate side effect of leaving a bitter taste in his mouth:

So money is a tool. It works like a key and you run into problems when the tool is over-worshipped its lower function can be forgotten. You wouldn’t keep a screwdriver in your pocket for so long that you forgot its function but I know plenty of people who do that with money.

Money’s the key and without money, c**ts wouldn’t be able to sell shit to us fools but, do you know what? - they f**king would. They’re such c**ts that they would find a way.

I’ve always said that art is about life and the art world is about money although the buyers and sellers, the movers and the shakers, the money men will tell you anything to not have you realize that their real motivation is cash, because if you realize – that they would sell your granny to a Nigerian sex slave, traders for fifty pence (ten bob) and a packet of woodbines – then you’re not gonna believe the other shit coming out their mouths that’s trying to get you to buy the garish shit they’ve got hanging on the wall in their posh shops.230

It seems he finds money’s aftertaste not that unpalatable, for right from the start, his art practice has involved repetitive output, for the very men mentioned above, through signatory

229 The Age. Bloomberg, AFP. $22.8M Record – Breaking Artist’s Sweet Pill to Swallow. Saturday 23 June 2007 230 Muir, Gregor, Wallis, Clarke. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. Tate Publishing, UK, 2004, p.82 97

brand pieces. In late February 2006, Hirst was solidifying the Hirst brand empire with a show at Hilario Gallery in Mexico City. In signature mode, Hirst rolled out the iconic pieces such as the shark in a tank, dissected sheep in three vitrines in a crucified position (a slight twist on sectioned sheep in vitrines), butterfly painting, spin and dot paintings. Even in the interview given to Jo Tuckman at The Guardian on the upcoming show, Hirst remarks on the way he must start to grow out of past work, that he needs to stop doing the ‘same old shit’, but then points to a spot painting sitting behind him on the wall (spot paintings – a series of coloured dots in which no two colours can be the same, painted on a white background). “It’s a very simple formula that you can’t argue with. It makes you feel good, so why stop? I think I’ve made about 600.”231

Hirst has always had the ability to know what to serve up to the market and it would seem at exactly the time the market was ready to receive it. Like Warhol, his awareness of himself as a brand means it is not about his personal input into the work, it is about the ideas.

Hirst confirms this approach to Don Thompson when he gave an interview at the , New York in March 2004, where he pointed out that this new work like his past pieces, shark, spot and butterfly paintings, is produced by a team of assistants. Hirst conveyed each painting, is done by several people, so no one is ever responsible for a whole work of art, his contribution occurs at the end of the process by adding a few brush strokes, and his signature. Thomson says in another interview, Hirst said:232

That he cannot paint, that a buyer would get an inferior painting if it was done by him. On the artistic ethics of using four studios and forty assistants to produce ‘Hirsts’ which he then signs, he has said, “I like the idea of a factory to produce work, which separates the work from the ideas, but I would like a factory to produce the ideas”.233

The idea behind the Gagosian Gallery show 2004 was based in one of his favourite subjects death, in particular violent death consisting of 31 photorealist paintings. The show caused some writers to exclaim, “yes he really can draw”. In the true power of himself as a brand, he titled the show, ‘Damian Hirst – The Elusive Truth’. A representative of the works one is called Autopsy with Sliced Human Brain set in a morgue.

231 Tuckman, Jo. The Bell Tolls for Hirst’s Tired and Tested Work. The Guardian. Monday 24 October 2005 232 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.72 233 Ibid, p.72 98

The opening of the show was a sell-out, top price reaching $2.2 million. Thompson responds to the show, and buzz that surrounds a brand celebrity such as Hirst, by commenting:

Those who praised the show said Hirst engaged in a meditation upon death in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Village Voice art critic, Jerry Saltz commented: “The best that can be said about these canvases is that Hirst is working in the interstice between painting and the name of the painter. Damien Hirst is making Damien Hirsts. The paintings themselves are labels – carriers of the Hirst brand. They’re like Prada or Gucci. You pay more but get the buzz of the brand. For between $250,000 and $2 million, rubes and speculators can buy a work that is only a name”.234

As a sign-off to this show, Hirst supplied a diffusion line, which encompassed signed prints and t-shirts. This is subscribing to the view, that it is better visitors to the gallery leave with a Hirst brand in the hand than nothing at all.

Hirst has done what even Warhol could not in his lifetime by creating a brand so desired by collectors that to acquire it the market is prepared to pay almost any price. Don Thompson reveals an example of this in February 2001, when AA Gill, feature writer and critic for the Sunday Times, approached Christies to sell an old painting of Stalin. Paying originally only £200 for it, the image hung over Gill’s desk as an aid to hard work, its artistic maker unknown.

Hoping it could be put into midweek auctions, Gill was informed that Christies did not deal in paintings of Hitler or Stalin by unknown artists. Gill posed, what if the painting, had been done by Warhol or Hirst? Well, then of course Christies would love to have it.

Gill contacted Hirst requesting if he could paint a red nose on the painting. Hirst obliged, adding his signature just below the nose. The painting which was not even desirable by Christies previously, had now been given an estimate of £8-£12,000. The hammer fell after seventeen bidders at £140,000. Money, right from the start of Hirst’s career, has been an important factor, if not more than his work. Whatever ‘wow’ factor he creates in his artwork, a second ‘wow’ comes in the amount he then generates from the work’s sale. He continues to

234 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.72-73 99

set the records and benchmarks for any current living artist’s work being sold at auction today.235

The more Hirst pushes the prices of his works the more the market responds, through not only matching his figures, but exceeding them, continual setting new benchmarks against his name. This can be seen with the work, ‘For the Love of God’, made from casting a life-size human skull in platinum with human teeth extracted from an eighteenth century skull (J). Hirst had purchased the skull from a taxidermy shop in Islington with one intention to make it the most desirable artwork ever made. To do this required a rare and valuable ingredient – diamonds. 8,601 paved set industrial diamonds to be exact. Weighing in at 1,100 carats. As if this was not enough wow factor, Hirst had the artisans of the Bond Street Jewellers, Bentley and Skinner, who had been contracted to encrust the skull, place in the centre of the forehead a large pink, 52.4 carat cut diamond said to be valued at £4 million. The cost of its fabrication varies, but Hirst is said it was around £12 million, his business manager, Frank Dunphy, £15 million. It was displayed to the public in June 2009 at the White Cube’s Mayfair gallery, London, with the show name, ‘Beyond Belief’.

The skull was exhibited upstairs in a darkened room of the gallery spotlighted, and required an entry ticket to view along with the stipulation that, groups of no more than ten could enter at any one time, for no longer than 5 minutes. The draw card may have been the skull, but it was more likely to be the price tag that it carried - £50 million pounds, which Hirst’s manager described as being on the cheap side.236

Once again as in the true brand experience, the skull was accompanied by some more affordable limited edition silkscreen prints of the work. The prints ranged from an affordable £900 right through to a top end run, that had a price tag of £10,000, and the bonus of being sprinkled with diamond dust. In September 2007, ten weeks after being displayed, the work was purchased by a group of investors at full price and in cash, according to Frank Dunphy. One of the investors was Hirst himself who retains a 24% controlling interest in the work, requiring the remainder investors, to cough up a cool £38 million to claim their part of the shares. This is now the most expensive artwork ever sold by a living artist. It is understood that the buyers other than Hirst himself, have remained anonymous, and intend to sell the work on at a later date. Well, a couple of years at least, that was the stipulation of Hirst who said it must be displayed for at least two years in a museum before being sold on again.237

235 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.76-77 236 Ibid, p.76-77 237 Ibid, p.76-77 100

Hirst has shown that he can stimulate the market to react to him as a brand through the endorsement of high evident in ‘For the Love of God’. He has also shown, regardless of economic trends that a brand artist can enjoy the favours of the market when other high-end brands do not. This could be seen as recently as September 2008 when Hirst sold 223 new works direct through the auction house of Sotheby’s. By the end of the two-day auction, against a volatile global financial market, Hirst had sold artworks to the value of £95.7 million, along with charting new ground through the act of bypassing the dealer. If it had failed, his dealers (Jay Jopling, founder of White Cube London & Gagosian Gallery New York,) would have been the biggest losers. This may count for the reason that Jopling was at both nights of the auction bidding on the first night on 20 out of the 56 lots. White Cube’s successful bids included a portrait, ‘Young Damien’, that more than doubled its £500,000 upper estimate. Even more extreme, was White Cube’s bid to help drive up a steel cabinet of manufactured diamonds from an estimate of £1.5 million to £5.2 million for an anonymous phone bidder.

In the wake of this ground-breaking auction, once again the art world has to re-align and re- evaluate the meaning and impact of art and the place it holds on the market today.238

Germaine Greer, just after this auction, wrote a piece in the UK Guardian newspaper aimed at art critics, in particular the Australian Robert Hughes. She says:

Hirst is quite frank about what he doesn’t do. He doesn’t paint his triumphantly vacuous spot paintings – the best spot paintings by Damien Hirst are those painted by Rachel Howard. His undeniable genius consists in getting people to buy them. Damien Hirst is a brand because the art from of the 21st century is marketing. To develop so strong a brand is conspicuously threadbare a rationale is hugely creative – revolutionary even. The whole stupendous gallimaufry is a Vanitas, a reminder of futility and entropy. Hughes still believes that great art can be guaranteed to survive the ravages of time because of its intrinsic merit. Hirst knows better. The prices his work fetches are verifications of his main point; they are not the point. No one knows better than Hirst that consumers of his work are incapable of getting the point. His dead cow is a lineal descendant of the Golden Calf. Hughes is sensitive enough to pick up the resonance. “One might as well be in Forest Lawn [the famous LA cemetery] contemplating a

238 Hoyle Ben. The Times. Damien Hirst makes £95m in Sotheby's sale, despite global slump. Sep, 17, 2008 101

loved one”, he shouts at Hirst’s Calf with golden hooves – auctioned for £9.2 million – but does not realise it is Hirst who has put that idea into his head. Instead, he asserts that there is not resonance in Hirst’s work. Bob dear, the Sotheby’s auction was the work.239

Nobody has better displayed the argument of whether an artist and their work can be brandified than Hirst. As Greer has implied in her statement, he has made his career and fortune out of investors and auction houses buying into the Hirst brand. Hirst’s greatest work and legacy is reflecting the priceless absurdity of the market itself. A market that looks to the gods of fashion, status, brands and fame, praying that the seasons of art, money and success they bring, never end.

239 Greer Germain. Germaine Greer Note to Robert Hughes, The Guardian Newspaper, Monday 22 Sep, 2008 102

CHAPTER 5: TRUST ME I AM A DEALER

Olav Velthuis, in the book, ‘Right About Now’, describes the juxtaposition of the gallery dealer space in the art market of the 1990’s.

The front room a white cube devoid of ornamentation and furniture. Any signs of commerce, is absent as in price tags, computers, or a cash register. The commercial space resides in the back room a physical line has been made in the architecture to deviate between art and commerce. The line between whether a gallery deals in the primary or secondary market, however, seems a lot less clear.240

In his interviews with dealers, Olav found them reluctant to talk about that part of their business. It implies the modern contemporary gallery is about commerce more than culture institution. Olav shares one dealer’s thoughts on the secondary market:

The secondary market violates the dealer’s self-assigned role as promoter of artists and a patron of art.

Another said:

You are not really cutting edge if you would touch something that is established […] you want to be perceived really… pure. And you are only pure if you do primary. If you do secondary you are not pure.

The impression that was being conveyed to Olav, was if you ran your gallery without the need of the secondary market, you could take great pride in the fact.241

This clarification between secondary and primary markets is crucial in explaining how artists are catapulted into the high end of the investment market. The secondary market plays a pivotal role in creating Art Brand Superstars. Already within these texts are examples of how important it is to manage the brand profile of an artist on the secondary market and how much money, status and reputations are at stake.

240 Schauemaker, Margaret. And Rakier. Mischa. Right About Now. Art and Theory Since the 1990’s, p.124-125 241 Ibid, p.124-125 103

For an artist to be receiving attention in the secondary market means that their representation and position within the art market is being handled by a high profile branded dealer. Don Thompson determines that apart from Gagosian and White Cube gallery, there would be maybe only another twenty galleries who could claim a position atop the pyramid of branded dealers. This elite group of dealers only represent artists who have achieved great success. If converted to percentages, it is less than 1% of all contemporary artists. Below the dealer gallery sits the mainstream dealer. Thompson refers to them as the gatekeepers to the world of contemporary art, determining who gets shown and who does not.242

Mainstream galleries are where most serious art collectors first see and purchase artworks. With a stable of 15 to 25 artists, an artist can expect to show their work in one or two main shows every eighteen months.

Don Thompson explains the intent of a mainstream gallery in regard to an artist:

The gallery expects to lose money on the first two or three shows of the artist’s work, but it is prepared to absorb a loss in return for the promise of profit on later shows and on resales in the secondary market.

If the art is successful at the gallery level, it will be shown at minor art fairs and, later, by mainstream galleries in other cities. The work will then be described and discussed in magazines. Artists who do not find mainstream gallery representation within a year or two of graduation are unlikely ever to achieve high prices, or see their work appear at fairs or auctions or in art magazines.243

Artists starting out in the stable of a mainstream gallery can find themselves with little bargaining power or knowledge of negating the commercial system. A system where both branded and mainstream galleries can take in the primary art market 50% of the selling price of an artwork to commission. The exception is a branded artist who can negotiate the 50% commission. Examples are Jasper Johns 90%, his dealer Leo Castelli 10%; Damien Hirst 70%, his dealers Gagosian and White Cube 30%. Mainstream gallery commissions can be seen from their perspective as a reward for investment. As it stands, two out of five new artists will not be showing in a mainstream gallery after their first show. One out of the five may reach success and be head hunted for a branded gallery, but only one artist in 200, once

242 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.45 243 Ibid, p.46 104

established, will ever reach a level where they will be put up as offers in an auction at Christies or Sotheby’s.244

This uncertainly can create unease in both dealer and artist. Sarah Thornton, from her book Seven Days in the Art World, says dealers are the middlemen, the contact between artists and the collectors, always on their guard against rivals who may be eyeing their most lucrative artist in the hope of poaching them. For Thornton, this is an art world where the craftsmanship of art has been jettisoned for something which carries a much higher premium – the character of the artist being, him or herself.

For the market to have and keep confidence in artists, they must be seen to be making artworks that are less about the need to cater to it and more about the desire to create works of integrity. In any brand, integrity is paramount. Lose confidence and you lose money.245

How a dealer gives confidence may be glimpsed in a statement that a dealer gave Thornton at the Basel Art Fair in 2008. The dealer’s name was Poe, one half of the gallery Blum and Poe. Thornton notes Poe leans back and thinks for a moment, then comments:

You have to have an eye – a savantish ability to recognise work that is symptomatic of an artist with real intelligence, originality and drive. While artists tend to be critical of the notion, dealers and collectors usually revere a ‘good eye’. The resolutely singular expression evokes a connoisseur with monocle or a Cyclops with infallible instincts. While its opposite, a ‘good ear’ is disparaged for being dependant on the opinions of others, an eye enjoys the thrill of recognising something ineffable, picking the best artists and, from within those artists oeuvres, the best work. Then you’ve got to stick with your artists. Look to the horizon, point at the genius and get everyone behind you to nod in agreement.246

This statement by Poe gives insight into the mindset of a dealer. It also could be overlaid as a description of one of the most influential super dealers of the last decade, Charles Saatchi. Saatchi has been the dealer’s dealer, with the innate ability to detect and collect art. If having a great eye is paramount for a dealer, he has something of a golden eye. He can look at an artist and see potential far beyond what the market estimated they were worth. Case being the

244 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.48 245 Thorton, Sarah. Seven days in the art World. Granta Publications, 2008, p.98 246 Ibid, p.97-98 105

German artist, Martin Kippenberger, a drunken maverick who made his best paintings and sculptures while drunk, eventually dying of liver cancer in 1997. Before he died, he was favoured and collected by Saatchi 247 even though he was only considered a mid-level artist. After his death, his prices and reputation both skyrocketed, Saatchi being one of the main beneficiaries. For the most part, Saatchi is seen as a trendsetter and Kippenberger was one of the rare times he started buying in an already established trend. When Saatchi buys, the market watches and usually follows, escalating the potential price and brand of an artist.248

Saatchi’s initiation into collection and appreciation of art began whilst on holiday in America in the 1960s. It was his wife Doris however, who first developed the interest and passion for art collecting. Doris grew up in America with both of her parents still living in New York. Living in London but taking regular holidays home to visit them, she would make sure they

247 Charles Saatchi, (b. June 9, 1943, Baghdad, Iraq), Iraq-born British advertising executive who is perhaps best known as a collector of contemporary art. His brother Maurice (b. June 21, 1946, Baghdad) was a full partner in his advertising concerns. Charles Saatchi was born into a Jewish family and was still a preschooler when his family emigrated from Iraq to London. By age 18 he had begun to work as a copywriter in the advertising business. Together with Maurice he founded Saatchi & Saatchi in 1970. By 1986 the company—which is now part of a larger conglomerate—was considered to be the largest advertising firm in the world, with offices throughout the world. Remarkably creative and efficient, Saatchi & Saatchi was an early proponent of global advertising. In Great Britain it was identified with the Conservative Party, whose campaigns it helped to articulate during the years in which Margaret Thatcher was at the helm. Challenges from within and outside of the firm caused both brothers to resign in the mid-1990s, soon to open the smaller firm of M&C Saatchi.

He started collecting early -- jukeboxes, initially -- and purchased his first work of art (a Sol LeWitt drwing) when he was still in his 20's. Soon he and his first wife, Doris, an American-born art writer, were flying to New York once a month to shop for major art. In 1985, they opened the Saatchi Gallery, 30,000 square feet of dazzling whiteness tucked behind imposing gray gates on Boundary Road. They put on shows that established them as the collectors with more -- more Julian Schnabels (27 paintings), more Anselm Kiefers (23 in all), more Cy Twomblys, more Joel Shapiros and, in particular, more gleaming grids and tilting trapezoids by the Minimalists. ''No one else was buying on that scale,'' says Joel Shapiro. ''And no one was more glamorous than Charles and Doris. They were young, bright and English, and they weren't cheap or stingy.'' But then their romance with the American art world seemed to evaporate almost overnight. In 1990, Saatchi and Doris were divorced, and like a man who longs to divest himself of his past and his possessions, he sold off most of the artwork they had purchased together. ''I loved Minimalism very passionately,'' Saatchi says, ''but when you realize there are other things in life besides Carl Andre and Robert Ryman, it's difficult to look at them and have the same love affair.'' He became consumed, by a circle of British artists who were in their early 20's and had befriended one another at Goldsmiths College. They were clearly aware of New York art and its theories, but their work appeared to be as much about the issues of youth -- sex, death, cigarettes, looking back in anger, etc. -- as the issues of art. In April 1990, visiting an artist-run warehouse show, Saatchi came away with his first piece by Damien Hirst, ''A Thousand Years,'' a seven-foot-tall glass box stocked with the decomposing head of a cow and a large supply of maggots and buzzing flies. ''I thought of it as punked-over Minimalism,'' he says with obvious relish. ''It was like Donald Judd gone mad.'' In 1992, a now-historic show called ''Young British Artists I'' opened at the Saatchi Gallery; within a year, the work of the Y.B.A.'s was appearing in New York galleries, Berlin kunsthalles and Venice Biennale pavilions. Saatchi, one might say, brings an adman's eye to the practice of connoisseurship; he favors art that makes an instant impact, art that surprises you and lodges in your brain, art with kicked-up visual appeal. What does it say about a culture when an adman rises and takes it over? Is this is a good thing or is it merely one more sign that fashion people rule the universe? Advertising and art have always been viewed as polar opposites. Advertising is about marketing and selling, about creating a mystique around a product so that consumers will buy one brand of soap instead of another. Advertising is necessarily a trick, whereas art is not a trick; it's an illusion that tells the truth. (a)

(a) Solomon, Deborah. The Collector. (Art critic and Biographer.) Published: September 26, 1999, New York Times. Newspaper. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9805E4DB1...

248 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.98 106

allowed enough time to tour galleries. The cornerstone of their collection grew out of what Doris had grown up and felt comfortable with – American Art.

In the 1970s, the Saatchi’s collection started to expand he was inspired by new works being imported into London by such dealers as Nicholas Logsdail who ran the . Having witnessed the changing of the guard in America from Pop to minimalism, Saatchi quickly began acquiring artists such as these with an ever-increasing appetite to expand his collection. This expansion moved to painting with acquisitions of artists such as Philip Guston, Ivan Morley, David Salle and Julian Schnabel.249

Collecting art had started out as simply a hobby but had now quickly developed into a passion, one that filled both his home and office. Realising this he had three options; one, stop collecting; two, put surplus artworks into storage; or three, open a gallery where both he and the public could benefit from his new-found passion. He chose the latter.

From his advertising savvy, Saatchi also realised that he had the means and knowledge to not only publicise his works and increase their value, but he had say over how they were presented. In 1983, he purchased a large disused warehouse at 98a Boundary Road, St Johns Wood for $2.5 million, several miles from the centre of London. It opened in February 1985.250

It was at St John’s Wood where Hirst had the first chance to see American artists such as Andy Warhol, Sol Le Witt, Bruce Naumann, Richard Serra and Jeff Koons. A favour you could say that was returned some years later in 1988 when Saatchi would view the work of Goldsmith College Art graduates in the show, Frieze, co-organized and curated by Damien Hirst. This show changed the course of not only Saatchi’s collection but also British art. Saatchi’s attention quickly shifted away from America’s international art to supporting and buying British art. Presented in a series of exhibitions, the shows prime objectives were to feature new and emerging young British art (which spurned the acronym, ‘YBA’). Some of these shows included then unknown names such as , , Rachel Whitehead and .251

A couple of factors may have contributed to this shift in heart for British Art in 1991. The first was a £64 million loss in his Advertising Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. The second was

249 Hatton, Rittan. Walker, John A. Supercollector, A Critique of Charles Saatchi, Eclipse, 2000, p.104-106 250 Ibid, p.131 251 Ibid, p.148 107

a divorce from his wife, Doris. It would seem, from a financial perspective at least, to make sense to buy home grown – in particular, new, cheap, unknown home-grown. For Saatchi, this was his opportunity to take unknown artists and elevate both them and their work to sought-after art commodities with a high market value. Stuart Jeffies, in an interview with Charles Saatchi in 2006, says, “Saatchi become one of the world’s great collectors.

In the 1990s, instead of downloading images on the computer, he visited makeshift galleries in empty hairdressing salons and warehouses and succeeded in unearthing possibly the most thrilling, certainly the most media-friendly, art Britain ever produced. He bought up a great deal of what he saw and made a generation of artists – Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, the Chapman brothers, Marc Quinn – rich and famous.

Saatchi would solidify his place within the art world through controversial shows such as ‘Sensation’ (1997) in which he showcased young British artists from his collection. Held at the Royal Academy of the Arts, the show became a media phenomenon. Staging ‘Sensation’ was, for the Royal Academy, a cheap show to stage as the works had derived from a single source – Saatchi. A publicity leaflet at the time described ‘Sensation’ as an attempt to define a generation and present to the public Charles Saatchi’s singular vision.

The show featured 110 works by 42 artists. Almost half of these were yet to have exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, and another 18 were Goldsmith College graduates. The show provided through its diverse objectives and media both a spectacle and entertainment. It was, however, the content that created most sensation for the media and public. Works were shown such as ’s (1995), a painted canvas imprinted with the paint of a child’s hand to create a type of pixieland face. This face was none other than the infamous imprisoned child molester, Myra Hindley. Myra was transposed from a police mugshot taken in 1961.252

Family and friends of the murdered children pleaded outside Royal Academy Burlington House for the public not to enter. Their requests came to no avail – in fact, the opposite result was achieved with attendance of 285,737 people, the most successful show at the Royal Academy for 1996-1997. Other controversial works included sliced animals by Damien Hirst which brought the wrath of animal rights activists, and Dinos and Jake Chapman’s erotic mannequins seen by the public as promoting paedophilia. In reviewing the show, Kitty Hauser comments:

252 Hatton, Rittan. Walker, John A. Supercollector, A Critique of Charles Saatchi, Eclipse, 2000, p.186-189 108

Hirst’s shark it seems has been domesticated. Stamped with the approval of the Establishment (it’s art!) and honoured by record numbers of exhibition visitors (it’s popular), it can now triumphantly slink back to the Saatchi archives as representative of a new(ish) king of art: an art which is unashamedly commercial, media-friendly, pleasurable and which boasts a wide audience.253

Michael Kimmelman, in an art review for , saw the controversy as highlighting the many interpretations that people assign to works of art as if derived from an argument spoken in different languages.254 When this argument, however, becomes a public one, it can overwhelm and define the artist for years.

Contemporary artists in a show such as ‘Sensation’ point to an art world that has cut itself off and become elitist. You learn to speak their language on their terms if you expect to relate to their work. Kimmelman says:

Damien Hirst is a clever artist not because he slices dead animals and packs them in containers of formaldehyde, but because, among other reasons, those huge containers, like his cabinets of pharmaceuticals and his zippy dot and spin paintings, allude intriguingly to minimalist sculpture and other ‘60s art. An outraged public fixated on the animals themselves became a foil for him. That’s the cynical part of the operation. The good part is that art, as the saying goes, is an equal opportunity elitist – anyone who wants to can learn to speak the language.255

For Rittan Hatton, Hirst’s works present a throwback to old dioramas of early natural history museums. Ultimately, though ‘Sensation’ is a showcase to one man’s vision and dedication to collecting and displaying British art of the ‘90s – Charles Saatchi. Was this a showcase of British art or a brilliant marketing coup for Saatchi the dealer in publicising his own collection? In the book, Supercollector, Hatton and Walker believe it is. They see Saatchi’s motivation for becoming a patron and collector as one driven by the need to express power and manipulation through a collection of art rather than advertising. The arts possess a social prestige of cultural and economic value that advertising does not.256

253 Hauser Kitty. Sensation. Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection. Journal The New left Review. Issue 227, 1998, p.154 254 Kimmelman, Michael. Sensation: After all that Yelling, Time to Think by, N.Y.T. Art Review, Oct. 1. 1999 255 Ibid 256 Hatton, Rittan. Walker, John A. Supercollector – A Critique of Charles Saatchi, p.241 109

Saatchi, in an interview in 2006 for The Guardian, saw his role as one of benefactor, assisting young artists who could only afford to show in alternative art run spaces. If he didn’t help, they could wait their whole lives for the opportunity to be shown by a gallery such as Anthony d’Offay or Leslie Waddington.257

Saatchi’s intention to find and publicise unknown artists, may be seen as an honourable and supportive act towards the visual arts, but others believe he has ulterior motives. The artist Peter Blake, a founding father of British Pop Art, is one such sceptic. Trained initially in graphic design, Blake has undertaken work and commissions to supplement his income from fine art sales. When Blake was informed from his dealer that Saatchi might be interested in acquiring some of his work, suspicion crept in. Was Saatchi’s interest to admire or just acquire? Blake instructed his dealer not to sell. Blake saw Saatchi as a bad influence, which collects and exalts some artists, while leaving others victims. His point was that once Saatchi had bought up an artist’s work wholesale, he would turn around (when he saw an appropriate profit to be made) and dump their work on the market, ruining their career.258

Blake says:

I have nothing against Charles Saatchi or the agency he started, but I formed the opinion very early on that he wasn’t collecting for the love of art. I disapproved of his policy of the blanket buying of one artist’s works which I think creates a false market. I didn’t want to end up as a commodity, so I asked my dealer, Leslie Waddington, not to sell to Charles Saatchi.259

Holding such a high ground of art integrity can be costly. Blake confessed at the time (1998) that he had no money and was in debt. At the other end of the scale was Damien Hirst.

Did Hirst see Saatchi in a manipulative light? In an interview in 2001 for The Guardian, Gordon Burn, on the relationship between Hirst and Saatchi asks, “Do you go through an intermediary, dealing with somebody like Saatchi?”.

Yeh, well, I do, definitely. I didn’t have to, but … it surprised me that none of the other artists [in Young British Art, YBAs] I spoke to had ever met him. I’ve met him, but I’ve kind of avoided meeting him. There’s so much myth

257 Jeffries, Stuart. What Charles Did Next. The Guardian. Wednesday September 6, 2006 258 Ibid 259 Hatton, Rittan. Walker, John A. Supercollector – A Critique of Charles Saatchi, p.212 110

surrounding him, I think its quite good that he’s buying my work and I haven’t met him … He bought quite a few from me before. I’ve always done my own shows, so when I did ‘Modern Medicine’, or ‘Gambler’, it’s, like, you just put a price on it, and I was not involved in the selling side of it, two people I was working with were. So, basically, Charles goes in and says, “I want it”, they say, “have it”, they invoice him, he buys it, collects it. It’s as simple as that really. Once you put a price on something, you really don’t decide who buys it, which I quite like as well.

“How will you feel about your pieces at some time in the future being off-loaded by Saatchi?”:

I think that’s the way the world is. I quite like it, I mean it’ll affect me and I’ll have to adapt to whatever happens in that situation.260

After representing Britain in prestigious events such as the Venice Biennale 1993, and solo shows at the Gagosian Gallery New York 1996, Hirst was ready for new challenges and an opportunity to expand his brand base outside the clutches of dealers such as Saatchi.

One such challenge was manifest in 1997 when Hirst became co-owner of a couple of restaurants, the best known being ‘Pharmacy’ in Notting Hill, filled with his pharmaceutical themed works. Unfortunately, Hirst’s mix of art and food became unpalatable with his customers and closed in 2003. However, the well-established profile of Hirst Inc would now become instrumental in returning a healthy profit. Hirst had leased his artworks to the restaurant venture and as such was able to sell off the pieces at Sotheby’s for more than £11 million (AUD16 million) when the restaurant closed. This was largely due to his now high profile brand identity which had, and continues to get, ongoing media coverage. In 2004, Saatchi and Hirst parted ways over disagreements of how and where Hirst’s work should be sold.261

A point in case was Saatchi’s New Gallery in South Bank London, where a collection of YBA’s, and Hirst works now reside. Hirst, as if to exercise his displeasure at still being associated with Saatchi, struck the show from his CV. His statement of adapting to whatever situation happens seems to now exclude the dealer, Saatchi. His statement in The Guardian (2007) states, “I’m not Charles Saatchi’s barrel-organ monkey! He only recognises art with

260 Gordon, Burn. Damien Hirst. The Naked Hirst. The Guardian Newspaper, Saturday October 6, 2001 261 Rosita Boland. Is this the Jewel in the Crown of Brit Art? Irish Times Ltd, 9 June 2007 111

his wallet … he believes he can affect art values with buying power, and he still believes he can do it.” Later in the interview, not wanting to be too confrontational, he said to the interviewer, Fiachra Gibbons, “Charles does his thing and I do mine”.262

Saatchi did agree to sell back to Hirst’s Gallery, White Cube, twelve works from his collection – works he had hung onto for his New Gallery were Shark, The Sheep, The Dots, Butterflies, Fish, The Flies and Hymn, and a 20ft anatomical figure. Feuds such as this can been seen by outsiders as just more publicity stunts for more media attention. For, not long after this media report, Saatchi bought a piece from Hirst’s show ‘Cancer Chronicles’, which comprised a collage piece using thousands of flies.263

For Saatchi, with or without Hirst, his love of art has continued on manifesting in the 40,000 sq ft South Bank gallery where his art collection now resides. of the London Evening Standard speaks for many in regard to the type of shows that have now opened since moving to this location, such as ‘The Triumph of Painting – parts one and two’, the theme is welcome, but it was a pity he had chosen the wrong artists. In a similar tone, the Observer’s Laura Cummings wrote that Saatchi now followed taste rather than selling it.264

For Saatchi, the golden days a decade ago have gone and times have changed. Isolating the stars of the British art scene is not so obvious anymore. The days of walking into a room, seeing a dead, rotting cow emitting a foul odour and flies buzzing around it have been and gone, as each successive generation goes for a completely different look.265

For Saatchi, the rise to the top of dealer Everest may have reached its plateau, but the tool that got him there still remains, trust. All investors look to their brokers for reassurance and trust they will provide a sound portfolio to invest their money in. So it is in the art world, Saatchi and his American counterpart, Larry Gagosian, have gained the trust of investors and collectors alike to deliver the goods. Both are seen now as branded dealers with celebrity status equal to the artists they represent and deal in. Unlike Saatchi, Gagosian is a dealer of the secondary market. The secondary market has a couple of good attributes for a dealer, one there are few overheads or staff costs in reselling. Two there is also no need to interact with the artist and pander to their insecurities.

262 Gibbons, Fiachra. Hirst Buys His Art Back from Saatchi, Guardian Newspaper, Thursday, November 27, 2003 263 Ibid 264 Jeffries, Stuart. What Charles Did Next. The Guardian. Wednesday September 6, 2006 265 Ibid 112

Gagosian has an, ‘A’ list of clients including Newhouse, Geffen and Saatchi. In the ranks of artists, he is a who’s who of branded names including (in the US) Richard Serra, Chris Burden, Jeff Koons, Mike Kelley, and the estates of Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning. On the British side, his stables include Jenny Saville, and Damien Hirst. Gagosian does a lot of advertising and self-promotion in art magazines, not just to attract new customers but to reinforce the brand, both of himself and his artists. It is an easy way to keep brand profiles out in the market and in the public eye and reassure existing customers that their artist and investment are being promoted.266

Location is equally important in accessing the right type of investor, which is why he has two galleries in New York, one in Bevery Hills, two in London and one in Rome. Don Thomspon points out, as a confirmation of the importance that super dealers now hold, in 2006 Gagosian attended and partook in the Maastricht Fair, turning it from just another show into one that was seen as the most important event of that calendar art year. 267

To show the trust he has now within the market, in January 2007, Gagosian pre-sold the show of the American artist, Tom Friedman completely online. He did this by supplying his clients with a password where they could exclusively access the Gagosian website and inspect the digital images that the show had on offer. All the work sold within a day just on these online images with prices as high as $500,000. This is the power of the brand, the belief and faith in a recognised symbol that hold weight in the market. He has the ability to sell art to a quarter of his clients without them ever asking ‘What does it look like?’ or ‘How much? As one employee of Gagosian told Thompson, “it is regulatory practice to phone clients and tell them, ‘Larry advises you need it for your collection’, which it seems they are happy to do, sight unseen.”268

Don Thompson says:

What kind of dealer pays $100,000 or more (sometimes a lot more) for a work of art they may have seen only as an image on a computer screen, or hear of on the phone, or know is from an artist with a limited reputation? The answer is, collectors who trust their dealer in the same way they trust their investment advisor. It’s the idea of buying art with the ears rather than the eyes, of buying

266 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.36-39 267 Ibid, p.36-39 268 Ibid, p.36-39 113

the artist’s expected future value. Selling this way is one of the defining characteristics of the superstar dealer.269

Amy Cappellazzo, who is a specialist and co-director of post-war and contemporary art for Christie’s, says:

Art is more like real estate than stocks. Some Warhol’s are like studio apartments in mid-block buildings with northern exposures, while other Warhol’s are penthouse properties with 360-degree views. A share of Cisco, however, is always just a share of Cisco.270

Cappellazzo was responding to a question posed by Sarah Thornton, ‘What is the Art Market’. Cappellazzo’s response may provide an answer but is also says to Thornton that to participate in the secondary market as a dealer, you require a ‘good eye’, a command at history, an instinct for the market, along with the ability to take risks, and a steady circle of supportive clients. Probably the most important thing that distinguishes a secondary dealer from a primary dealer is the need to be cashed up. Power lies in the ability to have the capital to buy with no financial pressures to sell. Thornton says few people like to admit to the joy of selling art. In the world of collectors, there are usually three traditional reasons for selling known as the ‘three D’s’ – death, debt and divorce – acts usually associated with misfortune and embarrassment.271

For Josh Baer, who reports on who is buying and under-bidding at auctions through his electronic newsletter, ‘The Baer Facts’, there is a fourth D. This is, collectors who have effectively become dealers. Their motivation can be driven by fashion because they wish to rotate their collection in the same way a dealer would or, as one Sotheby specialist told Thornton, many collectors consign works to auction because they have a plastic approach to their collection, they are people who are of the moment.272 Private collectors, says Thornton, account for almost two-thirds of contemporary art purchases in salesrooms. Because of the insecurities around buying and selling art, many collectors are advised by dealers or even auction houses, who are becoming perceived more as art consultant specialists than auctioneers.273

269 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.36-39 270 Thorton, Sarah. Seven days in the art World. Granta Publications, 2008, p.28 271 Ibid, p.30 272 Ibid, p.30 273 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.130-131 114

Market changes and forces inevitably alter player’s roles and relationships to art, including collectors. The new collectors, says Don Thompson, do not have the same breadth and knowledge that was once a prerequisite of connoisseurship. They are influenced by what’s hot from those in the know, be it an art magazine, Frieze or a specialist from Christies. They are however being overshadowed by the now preferred port of call, art fairs, where the collector can indulge in the art of one-stop brand shopping.274

The fairs feature superstar dealers, which in turn, attract the best collectors. The four biggest international fairs have such provenance that their brand names add value to contemporary art. These names are ‘Maastricht’, ‘Art Basel’ (reflecting its Swiss city name), Basel spin off, ‘Art Basel Miami Beach’, and the fourth being London’s ‘Frieze’. All four fairs are a moving circus of curators, museum directors, artists, dealers and art advisors. With a sideshow of public relations people and thrown in, these shows expose the hottest art around. For both the dealers and collectors, the power and allure of the brand is what draws many to participate in art fairs.

For the collector, everything is consolidated and researched and brought together in one convenient location. The main difference between a single dealer, and an art fair dealer, states Thompson, is that a dealer may only have three Gerhard Richter’s to show, where as for example, the Art Basel fair of 2007 a dealer had on display, twelve for offer.275

For dealers, this is an opportunity to do some brand building for both themselves and the artists they represent. To be seen at the best art fairs shows to collectors that they are a player in the prestigious end of the art market and, as such, worth investing in. The main concern for attending fairs such as ‘Maastricht’ is the booth rental cost, which can range up to £50,000. Add this to the cost of food, accommodation and shipping and it can reach up to £80,000. Costs such as this for reasons it would seem now a part of the ever-changing landscape of art, which finds itself in a world of aggressive self-promotion, branding and marketing.276

Dealers have been pivotal in effecting the value price attached to an artist and their work, post-World War II. For artists over this period to reach the high-end prices of the market along with kudos of attaining brand status, the process involved a series of steps, which could not be undertaken without the dealer. These steps involved first being shown by a

274 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.254 275 Ibid, p.187-188 276 Ibid, p.189 115

mainstream dealer then, if the opportunity presented itself, a superstar dealer and finally, if promoted and marketed well enough, purchased and placed within branded collectives and museums. At this level, their work will be shown and offered to the secondary market appearing at the Auction houses of Sotheby’s and Christies. This is, says Thompson, not about aesthetic judgement or critical acclaim. It is about the process outlined, which defines a hot artist.277 One artist who defied this process was Hirst. He produced the shock of the shark first, than landed the brand collector Saatchi, followed by the branded dealers, White Cube and Gagosian, then a museum show and finally an auction house. Hirst has since gone on to sell his work directly from the auction house, by passing dealers altogether.

What does this mean in the relationship of artist, dealer and collector moving forward? Don Thompson believes art fairs and auction houses may sound the demise of the dealer in the future when he notes:

The next seismic shift may be for Christie’s and Sotheby’s to follow Phillips and Bonhams and solicit consignments of brand new art that normally have gone through a dealer. Sotheby’s recently sold Barnaby Furnas, ‘Blown to Bits’ for $400,000 and said it agreed to take the consignment because had it not, Phillips or Christie’s would have. Furnas is represented in New York, by Marianne Boesky and in London by Stuart Shave. Could Sotheby’s contract to offer all new works for Furnas, or by more established artists like Jeff Koons or Jenny Saville, at biannual auctions, at one-third of the commission asked by current dealers? An auction house offering to sell the whole output of a hot artist is a scenario that terrifies dealers; the artist would lose some promotion and mentoring, but might find the offer tempting; My work sells out why give my dealer 40 or 50 per cent when an auction house will take 15 per cent or less and might achieve higher prices?278

If the two major auction houses expand their sale of primary market art, that would speed the demise of a great many dealers and signal a permanent change in the ecology of the art market.279

A world ruled by a super art dealer/auction house. Hard to imagine but it would have also been hard to imagine 100 years ago, brand artists such as Damien Hirst or super collectors

277 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.246-247 278 Ibid, p.255-256 279 Ibid, p.255-256 116

and dealers such as Charles Saatchi. For the small majority of branded artists which in London, according to Don Thompson, total around 75 artists pulling seven figure incomes, the evolution of a brand art auction house dealer would be a profitable enterprise as has been witnessed with Hirst. For the remaining throng of 40,000 artist residents that can be found in London or New York, it would create an impossible scenario to gain a foothold in the market. For all the mainstream dealers faults in selective handling, seeing about 1,000 slides of new work from which one new a-list is chosen to be added to a stable a year along with high commission fees, it is still the best and only way to gain wide level exposure to collectors.280

At any one time, Thompson states there can be as many as 15,000 artists walking the streets of London looking for gallery representation, the same also in New York. In total, there are only around 5,000 artists with mainstream representation, which is offset by careers in teaching, grants and writing – which is not surprising for Thompson as the market is very small. Totalling world wide 10,000 museum art institutions and public collections. On top of this, 1,500 auction houses and 250 annual art fairs, finishing off with 7,000 commercial galleries world wide – 70% North America and Western Europe. In money terms, calculating the primary and secondary market along with an average gallery turnover of about $650,000, a figure of about $11 billion is attained. $7 billion of this can be derived from contemporary art. On top of this, a second set of figures can be added - $5.5 billion form contemporary art sales in auction houses, along with another $5.5 billion from art fairs. Add both sets of figures up and world wide, contemporary art has sales figures of about $18 billion per year. Thompson makes a note this may sound a lot but it only matches the turnover of brand companies such as Nike and Apple Computers worldwide sales.281

In the end looking to dealers to equate the money and value associated and built around art through the tool of branding is maybe missing the point. It could be said that dealers are themselves just a part of the narrative as all gatekeepers mentioned throughout this thesis. Be it a brand or a masterpiece, it will become your choice as the observer and consumer to believe or not in the stories told. Joan Gibbons comments that artists and their public identity have become like their work consumer signs circulating in popular culture, for Gibbons art and artist’s are now:

Functioning almost as brand identities among numerous other brand identities. Artists can be said to have become part of the spectacle of consumerism: part of a simulated world of dreams, fantasies and desires rather than the ‘real’ world.

280 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.64-66 281 Ibid, p.64-66 117

However, it would be a mistake to think that this world of spectacle and simulation is an autonomous realm. The boundaries between what is real and what is fiction are notoriously permeable and people tend to negotiate their own relationship between the two. Moreover, the fact that contemporary artists develop brand images and advertise themselves through their behaviour, which is then talked up by the media, does not necessarily result in a devaluing of their art. That the media spectacle can influence the real to the good and be of benefit to art is perhaps best demonstrated by the huge increase in exhibition attendance for contemporary art, showing it to have become considerably less of an elitist product, even if only a relatively small number of people can actually afford to buy it.282

282 Gibbons, Joan. Art and Advertising, Publishers I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2005, p.156 118

CONCLUSION

Within this document there has been the attempt by me to shed light on the term ‘branded art’. From my standpoint at least, branding has revealed itself to be a denominator for creating value within the arts, by means of branded names and associations of standing. Of course value, as examined throughout this text, is relative to your position and the culture you reside in. So as an opening statement for this chapter it seemed appropriate to begin with an individual who, within the discussion of this paper, may be regarded as a gatekeeper of western art, Isabelle Graw. The comment was made as a part of a discussion on art’s value in the April Art Forum of 2008. It included, Amy Cappellazzo, International Co-Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christies, Thomas Crow, Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, Donna De Salvo, Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Robert Pincus-Witten, Scholar and Critic and former Director of Exhibitions at the Metropolitan of Arts New York and, of course, Isabelle Graw, a Founding Editor of Texte zur Kunst and Professor of Art History and Theory at Stadelschule Art Academy in Frankfurt.

The statement was made as a retort to a comment by Amy Cappellazzo, who believes auction houses are not structured to manipulate market prices, but are a legitimate system of business for creating and valuing art. Isabelle responds:

Why is manipulation the wrong word for the concerted action of dealers and collectors to prevent the price of a work by one of their artists from falling, or to increase it collaboratively, in order to share the profit later? Are auctions not orchestrated, curated events? Have I invented these practices? As you seem to indicate, auctions belong to those types of networked markets that consist of people communicating with one another. This art market is where participants talk to one another, exchange notes, gossip, etc. Many factors – current belief systems, conjectural and atmospheric changes – come into play when it comes to the process of making value. It is for this reason that a high degree of insecurity resides around value, as the French sociologist Raymonde Moulin pointed out some forty years ago: Value is never fixed: it is constantly negotiated and under reconsideration. Marx was right to define value as a social relation. My point is simply to contradict assumptions such as one offered by Tobias Meyer of Sotheby’s in the German news magazine Der Spiegel, in which he declared that the most expensive artworks are simply the best ones. While his confusion of the market with an aesthetic tribunal can be seen as a deformation professionelle,

119

it was actually more symptomatic for me that none of the journalists contradicted him.283

Views such as the one made by Tobias Meyer in the above statement, tell us a lot about branding. For in the hands of brand tastemakers such as Sotheby’s, art’s worth can be regulated not by aesthetics and content, but by its dollar value. A point in difference was the nineteenth century artist, Vincent van Gogh, who made art autonomously for himself, as opposed to the tastes and money of the salons.

Donna Da Salvo in the same article says, that things change and what matters today may not matter tomorrow.284 We will not be able to say in the future about Hirst’s work that it is of no value because we were misled in the past. The choices museum and auction houses make today continue to affect the future for, if they didn’t, the market price sitting beside each work would fall to zero. Art would surely then be called price-less. Today, to maintain an objective distance such as that imposed on Van Gogh would be absurd, but a degree of objectivity applied to current collections would perhaps give a truer sense of monetary value than already exists.

Donald Kuspit sees the contemporary artist living in a world that has become all business. It is impossible to avoid money because art itself has become money. This is the alchemy of capitalism transitioning the prima materia, says Kuspit, into the Ultima materia of money. Art’s role, because of this, has changed. No longer does it hold the position of what Kuspit calls Ultima materia, meaning eternity, because it was the closest thing to eternity on earth or as it is sometimes called, ‘the eternal present’. If we regard this statement in relation to Van Gogh and Hirst, the differentiation lies not in the time their work was made but that current art does nothing more than represent its time, instead of being what all art aims for – timelessness. For Kuspit, Pop Art was the moment when this reality came into being. Kuspit believes that it is not a case of whether art is good and money is bad, it is that it comes from radically different realms. That was until the brand face of Pop, Andy Warhol, decided to force them together. Through this action, Kuspit says, Warhol has devalued both, no matter how much his intention was to use each to increase the value of each other.285

Pretending that money and art share the same ground is the same as trying to argue, as Duchamp did, ‘theoretical conflating of art and non-art’, the outcome being what Kuspit likes

283 Griffin Tim. Artforum. “Art and its Markets”. A Rountable Discussion. April 2008. p.292-303 284 Ibid, p.292-303 285 Kuspit Donald, The End of Art. Published by Cambridge University Press, 2004, p.149-150 120

to call the American version of nihilistic.286 This is the opposite of what Kuspit says should be art’s effect on the consciousness of self and world, an evolution of cognitive and hard emotional work full of possibilities and the unfamiliar. Instead, Kuspit states we have:

Warhol’s pseudo-dialectic the facile conjunction of art and money disillusions rather than enlightens us about both. It is a social association, and as such unessential – it may make sense in money-mad American society, but it is meaningless in the tribal cultures that produced so-called primitive art – rather than a necessary evolutionary synthesis. Art and money do not synergistically reinforce each other, bringing us to a new consciousness of both. Nor does their relationship give rise to a consciousness that transcends both by seeing them in a larger perspective. Instead, each compromises the other – not exactly a true reconciliation. Instead of making money more important and meaningful by associating it with art, and art more important and meaningful by associating with money, both become meaningless and unimportant.

Warhol’s remark about “the thing called ‘art’ or whatever it is called” suggests as much. It is no longer clear what it is, or what it means, or why it is important, but it is quite clear what money means for Warhol. Art may be indeterminate, but money has the power to determine what is art.287

To show this aspect to art in a brand culture, in the first completed piece of the practical show, Brand Standing’, the base symbolism of ‘Vitruvian Man’ was split apart to emphasise, as Kuspit has explained, the meaningless and unimportance of art if the two are forced together to determine its value. This holds significance for me because as referenced earlier, there have been two sides to my creative path, one advertising, the other fine arts. Advertising teaches long term value in a product is established and maintained through branded identity. For the art world this has meant creating value through the branded identity of the artist. Artists must traverse, as any product in western culture, the demands of commodity placed upon them, such as advertising and art, money and brands, value and self, art and the consumption. The work presented in my show was a response to this, questioning arts determining value, for if not, we are just accepting Kuspit’s view of a nihilistic outcome.

For if art was nothing more than aesthetic converting to money, the depth and diversity produced around the world every day would not be there. Branding and art are not a

286 Kuspit Donald, The End of Art. Published by Cambridge University Press, 2004, p.149-150 287 Ibid, p.149-150 121

tautology (meaning the same thing), or what Isabelle Graw called in the art forum discussion, “cognitive capitalism”. For Graw, the battle of being an artist within capitalist culture can be countered; we only need to look to artists such as Andrea Fraser to see it being done. For Fraser the biggest obstacle faced is no matter how art is positioned on the pedestal of western culture, its meaning converts to commerce. Fraser explains the struggles of being an artist of commerce when she says:

Am I really serving my own interests? According to the logic of artistic autonomy, we work only for ourselves; for our own satisfaction, for the satisfaction of our own criteria of judgement, subject only to the internal logic of our practice, the demands of our consciences or our drives. It has been my experience that the freedom gained in this form of autonomy is often no more than the basis for self-exploitation. Perhaps it is because the privilege of recognising ourselves and being recognised in the products of our labour must be purchased (like the “freedom to labour” as such, according to Marx), at the price of surplus labour, generating surplus value, or profit, to be appropriated by another. In our case, it is primarily symbolic profit that we generate. And it is conditioned precisely on the freedom from economic necessity we express in our self-exploitation.288

Exploitation that in the case of Hirst, becomes unclear, as we are never sure who is the exploited and who is the exploiter. He shows that being art market savvy is the business of being aware. It would seem he understood from the outset that in business, a shark is a shark and you do business with the knowledge that you and the shark understand that. Damien Hirst’s work, ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ (1991) or shark in a tank, for me is the work that captures this. The art world it seems has never caught on to the fact that the symbolic gesture of a tiger shark was Hirst stating that the biggest shark in the art world tank was now him.

For Hirst, creative freedom comes in the form of being the most awarded and valuable artist in the world today. With every dollar paid to him, it would seem to highlight the value of his worth is not now attributed to his art, but to him. It is evident in the statements he makes such as, ‘becoming a brand name is an important part of life. It’s the world we live in’.289

288 Fraser Andrea, Paper delivered at the “The Depot”. How to provide an Artistic Service. Vienna. October, 1994 289 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.67 122

The art world would dismiss this view and look to Hirst’s work as something that denotes an artistic commentary of culture such as this by Virginia Button, curator at Tate Modern, who describes, ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ as being brutally honest and confrontational, he draws attention to the paranoiac denial of death that permeates our culture. This, for Don Thompson, is a case of finding meaning more with the title of the work than the intrinsic value held within Hirst’s art. Turning this around as art commentary on the seediness of art as money and business in creating brand icons, such as Hirst himself, would undermine the importance and integrity that is maintained and sanctioned from within the art world. An art world that has bestowed in the case of Hirst, the Turner Prize (1995) which again for Thompson was more about the title than the work, ‘Mother and Child, Divided’, than the object, a cow divided in two lengthways from nose to tail and placed in vitrine tanks.290

Imposing meaning and worth on an object may explain why branding has become such an influential factor in arts cultural evaluation today, or what James B Twitchell refers to as the narrative. This for him is what unites branding to art, art to advertising or belief to the church. Twitchell says that a story doesn’t even have to have anything to do with the product. Marketers have long used the tool of narration to build relationships with companies, art, museum, schools, charities, celebrities, almost anything on offer within capitalism. Once connected to a commercial narrative, it now becomes the job of branding to exploit the consumer.291

Twitchell believes that we use branding like a kind of currency of exchange we cluster around them as if sacred relics, we show them loyalty as we would a national flag, and they are the newest members in our family of man. It is not just a case of seeing communities of brand users, there are communities of brands.292

Twitchell refers to Susan Fournier, of the Harvard Business School when he states:

Things fit into patterns, constellations, jigsaw puzzles brand rhyme. They are loyal to one another. She reports in a journal article, ‘Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research’, that brand stories act like religion not just by holding people together but also by holding individual experiences together. Like parables, the stories behind how you use a

290 Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, 2008, p.74-75 291 Twitchell, B. James. Branded Nation, Simon and Schuster. Rockefeller Center, NY, 2004, p.43 292 Ibid, p.25 123

certain brand of say, toothpaste, how your parents used it, how is has appeared in your life, what makes you believe in it and want to associate with it – all these point to an absolutely natural extension of human relationships not just to other humans but to … of all things … things.293

Regulated responses of meaning and worth now attached to objects and art from manufactured brand stories is a shift in the way we have come to view the world. It is a collective gazing outward, using brands as a way to make meaning and value of our consumer lives. It’s what makes this subject such an important and relevant one to me. For it could be said we now live in a world, where identity emanates from a marketing and advertising construct, a fusing of brands and host, as outlined in this paper. Donald Kuspit conveys in his book, “The End of Art”, that Warhol reduced art down to a level of business and entertainment, to be absorbed into an ever expanding, American celebrity culture, he notes:

“Art continues to pay a high price for Warhol’s exposure of its real interests. It sells itself to the highest bidder, which suggests uncertainty about what it has to sell. If what it has to sell is valuable only because the people with the most money want to buy it, it has only the value their money gives it, suggesting that it doesn’t believe in its own value. How can it have unique value in a society in which business and entertainment show us that there are no unique values? ”294

It could be said for such reasons we now see a public regarding art as a culture of money, a golden calf of celebrities housed and displayed in museums and art fairs. Which has meant at least within Britain, according to Jonathan Jones art critic for the guardian newspaper a decline in museum public support and funding. A fact that not even Damien Hirst the most famous brand artist of his day campaigning against art cuts could change. Jones says:

“Once the thing everyone knew about Hirst was that he pickled sharks. Nowadays, the thing everyone knows is that he is immensely rich. He made money hand over fist even as the market hit the buffers. He is Mr Money. Who outside the art world is going to see him as a plausible voice against art cuts? 295

293 Twitchell, B. James. Branded Nation - The Marketing of Megachurch, College, Inc; and Museumworld. Publishers Simon and Schuster, 2004, p.24 294 Kuspit Donald, The End of Art. Published by Cambridge University Press, 2004, p.152 295 Jones, Jonathan. Art’s Faustian pact with Commerce means it’s no good Carping about Cuts. The Guardian Newspaper, October 24. 2010 124

Even the bastion of the arts the Tate Britain says Jones has been seduced by a branded culture of money.296 With their London autumn calendar of 2010 was geared around the , which may be considered within the art world a branding extravaganza. For such reasons convincing the public that artists, museums, galleries and dealers are more than a brand rich culture of elite status driven money-makers has become a tough ask. Jones says unfortunately that:

“The art world has done a bloody good job convincing everyone that it sleeps with celebrities on beds of hundred pound notes. Museums should never have succumbed to the money culture. In reality, they are as essential and unglamorous as buses”297

Art now sits in a place of different values and reception since the Second World War, comments such as those made by Jones alludes to such changes. Throughout this paper and through the visual show there has been an attempt to show the role branding has had on art. With the help of selected artists, theorists and critics, my position has been one of illumination on a subject that culminates in this chapter. Unlike a scientific theory-based paper, mine does not provide a definitive result or conclusion. Simply for the reason of doing so would be to oppose the most important role art has, of being subjective. For me if there was a conclusion on the impact of branding, it would be that arts reception and value as a cultural artifact is not to be found in the aesthetic anymore. It is as this research has shown, shifted away from the artwork to the artist, who must be now seen to represent a branded symbol of monetary value and exchange.

Branding as seen throughout this paper has shown that it now plays an important role in the vocabulary of western culture language and stories. Stories, which, in branding terms, have become the new guide to art’s value and standing. As mentioned at the very start of this paper, it is a conversation that is taking place at the very highest level of the investment art market. For this reason, many of the issues raised within this paper in regard to branding and art, may seem distant and detached, due to the realisation that most artists operate and work outside the speculative art market. This however doesn’t change the fact that, as a subject, branding encapsulates all aspects of culture through signifiers that are understood by all who reside in it - desire, celebrity, money, status and taste.

296 Jones, Jonathan. Art’s Faustian pact with Commerce means it’s no good Carping about Cuts. The Guardian Newspaper, October 24. 2010 297 Ibid 125

My closing statement will be left then to the same person who opened the chapter, Isabella Graw, for it embodies within it the difficulty faced by all those who engage within the arts today - to separate symbolic meaning out of a brand market whose standing and value is now based on monetary value.

“I agree the artwork is a commodity of a special kind. It is considered unique, and it is split between its assumed symbolic value and its market value. The peculiarity of its Doppelcharakter relies on the fact that it can have a price only because it is assumed to be priceless – which is true to a certain degree, as what is at stake in artworks cannot be reduced to a price. Since the idealist aesthetics of Kant and Schiller, Art with a capital A has been charged with symbolic value, and this might explain why it is desired so strongly today. It is supposed to give you more meaning than, say, a handbag from Louis Vuitton. Collector’s motives can’t be reduced only to speculation. They want the market value to increase, yes – but their motives are hybrid. They want this symbolic value as well.” 298

298 Griffin Tim. “Art and its Markets”. A Rountable Discussion. Artforum, April 2008. p.292-303. 126

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FURTHER READING

Anthony Komer, Knight Landesman, Charles Guarino, This is Today Pop After Pop, Art Forum International, October 2004, Special Issue, New York, 350 Seventh Avenue NY 10001

Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodernity and its Discontents Polity Press, 65 Bridge Street, Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK, 1997.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics, Les Presses du Reel, Dijon, 1998, 2002

Beck, Ulrich. & Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth. Individualization Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences Sage Publications, 6 Bonhill Street, London EC2A 4PU, 2002. Reprint 2003.

Braudel, Fernand. The Structures of Everyday Life. The limits of the Possible. Civilization and capitalism 15-18th Century. Williams and Collins, Sons and Co, Ltd London and Harper and Row, NY. 1981.

Cummings, Neil and Lewandowska, Marysia. The Value of Things, Birkhauser – Publishers for Architecture, Basel, Boston, Berlin/August London, 2000 Birkhauser, PO Box 133, CH- 4010 Basel Switzerland – 200 August Media Ltd, 11-120 Golden Lane, London, EC1Y 0TL

Fried, Michael. Art and Objecthood, in Charles Harrison and Paul Woods (eds), Art in theory, 1900-2000 an Anthology of Changing Ideas, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002

Gablik, Suzi. Has Modernism Failed, Thames and Hudson Inc., New York, revised edition, 1984-2004

Grosenick UTA Riemschneider Burkhand, Art at the Turn of the Millennium, Taschen, Printed in Italy 1999

Goldman, Robert. Papson, Stephen. Nike Culture, Thousand Oaks and Sage Publications, London and New Dehli, 1998

Gobe, Mark. Emotional Branding – The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People, Allworth Press 2001, 10 East 23rd Street, New York, NY, 10010

Gobe, Marc. 10 Commandments for Transforming Brands in a Consumer Democracy, Allworth Press 10 East 23rd Street New York, 10010. 2002.

Hamilton, Clive & Denniss, Richard. Affluenza – When Too Much is Never Enough, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest NSW 2065, Australia. 2005.

Kellner, Douglas. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern Routledge, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE, 1995. Reprint 1996, 1997, 1998 twice, 2000 twice.

Lasn, Kalle. Culture Jam – How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge, and Why We Must, HarperCollins Publishers Inc, New York, NY, 1999. 140

Legrain, Phillippe. Open World The Truth about Globalisation Abacus, Brettenham House Lancaster Place London WC2E 7EN. 2002.

Lory, Celia. Consumer Culture, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1996.

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The Age. Bloomberg, AFP. $22.8M Record – Breaking Artist’s Sweet Pill to Swallow.. www.theage.com.au. Saturday 23 June 2007.

Van den Bosch, Annette. The Australian Art World, Aesthetics in a Global Market, Allen & Unwin, 83 Alexander St, Crows Nest, NSW, Australia, 2005.

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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: Garrett, Paul Dennis

Title: Brand standing

Date: 2011

Citation: Garrett, P. D. (2011). Brand standing. PhD thesis, Victorian College of the Arts, School of Art, The University of Melbourne.

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/36385

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