JANUARY/FEBRUARY, 2024
I read recently on the New York Times website a reference to the opening of exhibitions by two artists, one of whom I’d never heard and the other being our own ubiquitous Tracey Emin. Both were referred to – in the US’s newspaper of record, mark – as ‘well-known brands’. For some reason on this occasion the ‘b’ word hit me like an emetic. Would I walk even a yard to see work by a ‘brand’, any more than I’d enter a supermarket to admire a soup label? And yet here the phrase was used to signal the individuals’ importance and high status. ‘Brand’ is a word I’ve often read in reference to State Artists, especially the ones who strain every sinew to keep themselves in the news. Most often they do this by giving the same interview over and over again, or, in repeated exhibitions, by pushing lines of over-familiar merchandise as though they were their own souvenir industry. But I’d never before now thought of ‘brand’ as quite so repellent a notion in relation to art. On the other hand State Art’s usual suspects, those masters and mistresses of flannel over form, doubtless welcome it as an accolade, a career stepping-stone like winning a prize, getting cancer or being awarded an undeserved honour.
How did we reach a point where artists are referred to as ‘brands’? You won’t be surprised to learn that branding in contemporary art is yet another of State Art’s perverse inventions. Indeed, the brief history of State Art overlaps exactly with the calculated creation of artistic reputations as ‘brands’. Using the language of advertising must make the art establishment feel different and appealing. Or perhaps they don’t care, if only because words when used by them have a tendency to mean anything other than the OED’s definition.
In the UK this process began in the early 1990s with the emergence of the so-called ‘young British artists’, for whom becoming known and achieving visibility and wealth was more important than the insight of what they, or, more accurately, their craftsmen contractors, actually produced. We might place the beginning of our officially sanctioned policy of branding to the moment when Serota and dealer Jopling convened a meeting in 1991 whose attendees were tasked with devising a means of marketing the current art they were all desperate to see advanced if not appreciated. (Serota once observed that he preferred an artist to be “validated by the trade” before the Tate acquired work: an admission right there that he couldn’t trust his eye. Not a good recommendation, you might think, for a Tate Director.)
Their main vehicle would be a revised (and rigged) Turner Prize, itself now in a permanent vegetative state requiring life-support. No tactic, they decided, would be too underhand or offensive. It was as brazen as feeding juicy, usually salacious stories to tabloids in order to generate controversy. Notoriety breeds Brand. It was advantageous to them that on their side they had an advertising executive and art dealer, Charles Saatchi, who was uniquely qualified to know the value of appearance over substance. What they in fact achieved was to create a brand not just for individual artists but for ‘Contemporary Art’ per se. Branding, as advertisers know, creates quality out of nothing, its success causing prices to inflate disproportionately to the cost of manufacture. You pay for the name. Among other absurdities, this process has created the magical paradox by which in, say, Minimalism, the less you see the more you pay; that is, until the reductio ad absurdum is reached when the collector forks out telephone numbers for a typed sheet of A4.
Curiously, the establishment of a name as a brand also places it beyond criticism; a reputation soon becomes taken for granted. As has happened with so much fashionable Contemporary Art, constant exposure is essential to the value of the brand, hence, post-1991, dealers employed armies of treacherous clerks dedicated to the purpose of keeping each ‘name’ before the public whatever the context. The more it appears in print or on the television, the more likely the reader is to accept without hindrance the quality of what is being sold. It’s the name that counts. I hope we may one day return to a time when the work proclaims the name, not the other way round.
I’m not hopeful this will happen any time soon because brands receiving relentless promotion (which is, after all, State Art’s principle job – courtesy of your money of course) have a habit of enduring. Well-managed, they create an unstoppable momentum for themselves; a demoralising thought. In the 1960s when former Ireland rugby international, Tony O’Reilly, marketed Kerrygold as distinct from other identical butters, he made branding an essential part of achieving commodity success and longevity. Today, Kerrygold still sells faster in German supermarkets than any other brand on their shelves, and not just butter.