Branding in the Art World: The Contemporary Visual Artist

IntroductionIn of mass consumption, art itself has become a commodity. history of contemporary art is now written depending on art's integration in art market while its relation to its audience gets to be highly influenced by this market. We are now facing a new type of reception of contemporary art that is becoming more and more popular, while success associated with art gets to be similar (on a reduced scale, though) to that associated with other cultural industries. Artists have become celebrities; art itself is extremely spectacular, while both insiders and outsiders are strongly fascinated by its aura. For example, Damien Hirst's retrospective exhibition held in Tate Modern London in 2012 has been most popular solo show in history of institution, attracting record-breaking visitor numbers, as well as Jeff Koons' retrospective at Whitney Museum of American Art in 2014, which was most visited exhibition in 83 years of museum existence, or that of same artist held at Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2014-2015 which reached 112000 visitors in its first 17 days. In this context, numerous press clips, magazine articles, TV documentaries and academic research try to investigate a series of issues related to this subject, by pointing out spectacular character, relation between contemporary art and market economy, particularities of art and value of art work, PR and marketing strategies and other more. Our interest in this context is related to phenomenon that is associated with contemporary art, more precisely to figure of contemporary artist. Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami are only some of names that have been referred to as brands. In same time, Larry Gagosian, Jay Jopling are called branded dealers, Charles Saatchi, Francois Pinault, Bernard Arnauld are seen as branded collectors, while Tate Modern, Guggenheim or MoMa are branded museums. Still, while mentioned institutions have invested a lot in an institutional branding process, artists' branding is a consequence of strategies that are marketing individual personalities as products and of particular functioning of art system. Consequently, present article will question celebrity status of contemporary artists, branding mechanisms integrated in art system, relationship between celebrity status and that of a brand and values associated with contemporary artists' brands. Two theoretical directions - theory of art worlds (Danto, 1964), (Bourdieau, 1998), (Dickie, 1975) (Becker, 2010), institutional theory of art (De Duve, 1989), (Dickie G., 1984) - constitute background for this research and provide tools for use of brand term in connection with figure of contemporary artist.The art - a systemic networkWe consider that of art presents itself as a vast socio-economic systemic network. A.C. Danto is first to give a definition to philosophical notion of the art world that includes communities of interpreters - critics, art curators, artists and collectors - within galleries and museums to suggest that it is impossible to understand conceptual art without help of this art G. Dickie's theory (Dickie G., 1975) states that a work of art becomes art only if it gets status of potential candidate to appreciation of social institution called the art world. Therefore, any artifact may become art as long as the art world decides to call it art: The work of art, in its classifying meaning, is (1) an artifact, (2) a set of aspects which were given status of candidate to appreciation by a person or persons acting in name of a certain social institution (the art world). Returning several years later to problem of status of a work of art, Dickie (Dickie G. …