Outstanding

The discipline of marketing has found a welcoming home in the art museum world. Relentlessly positive and unabashedly promotional, museum communications sometimes feel as though the clock has been turned back to the excitable 1990s. Take a recent announcement for an upcoming exhibition by Christchurch’s CoCA. For what's basically another local show (it's titled Contemporary Christchurch) the 148-word announcement has managed to squeeze in 10 superlatives to remind us how to respond:

excited
celebration
innovative
vibrancy
stimulating
creative
lively
inspiring
innovative
amazing

How incredible is that?

Pointing the finger

What is it about art that sends marketing into such a spin? You can’t say that the Auckland Art Gallery hasn’t done its bit recently to present some new ideas about painting with riffs on what a sophisticated medium it is etc. But when it comes to representing a painter on an ad for Auckland's 'Autumn of the Arts' the AAG got itself associated with an artist in bullfighter pose hard at some sort of finger painting. And that’s ignoring the resulting artwork-on-an-easel that was probably knocked up by one of the art director’s kids. ‘We need to do a poster on brain surgery, anyone got a good image?' ‘I’ve got one of a guy wielding an axe, would that do?’ ‘Perfect.’

In Fukuoka...

...we were thinking about Paul McCarthy.

Images: left advertising Fukuoka and right Paul McCarthy Daddies

Listing badly

By their lists shall you know them. This one is from the Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch. It’s an advert that aims to promote the school by highlighting their 75 most illustrious former students. As with all lists, however, it tells its own story that is probably not the one intended. While it's not so surprising that an art school with only has one female on a teaching staff of nine only includes women as just 31 percent of its alumni, some of the omissions verge on the bizarre. Ok we hear you Ilam, you couldn’t include everyone, but no Jim Allen (the Arts Foundation's most recent Icon)? et al.? Jacqueline Fahey? Boyd Webb? Really?  

Now, over to all of you for a game of who’s in and who’s out. Here’s the full list and our first go at it. Have fun.

IN      OUT

Arts administration 

John Coley                                        Rodney Wilson
Hamish Keith

University Lecturers
Andre Hemer                                Jim Allen
Jim Speers                                        Doris Lusk
                                                            Richard Reddaway

International reputation
Bill Culbert                                       John Panting
Vincent Ward                                   Boyd Webb

Photographer
Mark Adams                                     Margaret Dawson

Expressionists
Allen Maddox                                   Philip Clairmont
Tony Fomison

Walters Prize winners
Dan Arps                                            et al.
Peter Robinson
Francis Upritchard           

Painters
Quentin MacFarlane                        Jacqueline Fahey

Sculptors
Paul Cullen                                        Chris Booth
Anton Parsons                                  Andrew Drummond
                                                             Molly Macalister
                                                             Pauline Rhodes

And, to add to the female-out total, alongside Margaret Dawson, Jacqueline Fahey, Doris Lusk, Molly Macalister and Pauline Rhodes you can add Evelyn Page, Rata Lovell-Smith, Rosemary Johnson, Elizabeth Kelly, Rhona Haszard and Alison Duff.


BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE, OUR READERS KICK IN: Oscar Enberg, Gavin Bishop

Now See Here!

In the City Gallery’s current exhibition Demented Architecture there's a felt tip pen rough of an advertising campaign Saatchi & Saatchi developed for the Brodsky and Utkin exhibition. Nice to see it has survived as stuff like this is very rare as we discovered when we were researching exhibition files a while back. When art museums get advertising agencies to create their campaigns, anything can happen. 

We posted some years ago about a hilarious campaign offered to the National Art Gallery using Edvard Munch’s poignant image of a child at her mother’s deathbed. The empathetic catchline? 'Lighten up Edvard'. While that didn’t fly the City Gallery did once trick up a fake McCahon as an opening billboard. And then there was Te Papa’s needy ‘Get in the picture’ campaign and the Auckland Art Gallery's Monet TV ad. All the 1980s paraphernalia of choppers and security vans, ostensibly bringing the super valuable paintings to the gallery, certainly has a different tone today. 

The latest in these agency brainwaves is the Govett-Brewster’s current launch campaign. It reaches back for inspiration to a decade or so to, say late 80s/90s when ad agencies were full of confidence and bluster. Social media was still to been invented and believe it or not hectoring your audience was considered cool. In 2015 this tone jars. The G-B campaign barks 'Art punches and screams and kicks'. And as the poster next to it taunts, 'If you don’t feel something, maybe you should.' On the other hand why not step out of the way and let it kick somebody else.

Images: top Brodsky and Utkin ad layout and bottom Govett-Brewster campaign

LA story

So we’re having coffee in Starbucks (it happens) and the guy next to us sees we have copy of  Erling Kagge’s book A poor collector’s guide to buying great art and asks if he can tell us a story. OK. “I used to work in advertising, for Young & Rubicam”, he tells us. “We had the Life Saver Corporation account (true enough, that’s what it was called, we checked), and I was asked to come up with a campaign for them. I decided to do a lithograph of a Life Saver pack with a smart tag line, and that’s what I did. A few days later I get a knock on the door - this is in 1956 or maybe 1957 - and it’s a guy called Andy Warhol who I’d seen around in the ad business. He tells me he’s heard of the campaign and could he see the litho. So I say ok, but ask him to keep it to himself you know ‘cause we aren’t showing it to the client for a couple of weeks. Then, years later, I see the same ad as a Warhol print and it’s selling for tens of thousands of dollars. Art and advertising, what can you say?”
Image: Andy Warhol print from the portfolio Ads 1985

Just saying

“a remarkable collection”
“an unparalleled collection”
“this magnificent acquisition”
“representing high points in the artist’s achievement”
 “the most comprehensive representation of his oeuvre held together in any single collection”
“important masterpieces have been added”
“especially strong in late masterpieces”

The James Wallace Trust pumps up its collection of works by Tosswill Woollaston in a recent 500-word PR release.

The road goes ever on

They say Lookalikes are where you find them. Well, we just did. Could this campaign pasted all over Wellington be from the same agency that did the Spielberg face for the Auckland Art Gallery's Light Show? You kind of hope not, but there it is again, the slack jaw and the glazed stare, but this time for Sky movies. So we've got a Lookalike of a Lookalike, what more could you ask for? You can catch up with the Spielberg face here and our original AAG/Spielberg post here.

Face off

Auckland Art Gallery’s marketing for its Light show is kind of strange. For some reason the Gallery has abandoned the brand image it set out with when the new building was opened and now comes up with a new graphic style for each show. The current Light show campaign pulls out what's become known as The Spielberg Face to draw the crowds. 

The Face is the signature of Stephen Spielberg as a movie director - a human face suffused with wonder as it confronts an amazing sight. Pop culture commentator Matt Patches describes it best: “When a character looks up and catches something unexpected, that's the face. When a character watches something otherworldly take place in front of their eyes, that's the face. When a character stares outward, mouth slightly agape and has a revelation that will change them forever, that's the face.” You can see the Spielberg face in action here in a video essay by Kevin B Lee. 

The Auckland Art Gallery are hoping that The Spielberg Face (rather than a pic of one of the light sculptures and rave reviews from the UK media) will be what attract a rush of visitors to the show, their lips parted and their bright eyes shining wide in anticipation.

Images: top, the Auckland Art Gallery poster for Light Show and bottom, the Spielberg Face

Art and the movies

Here’s a site after our own hearts. Film and Fine Art 101 has saved us a heap of Google time putting together art images adapted for film posters. You can see more here. (Thanks L)

Added value

Advertising has always loved to use art as a sign of wealth and taste. No matter how much our art museums push to open their doors to a wider range of audiences, advertising always manages to pull it back to the gold frame. Take this Lexus ad as an example. Interestingly it has also latched onto the idea of photography finally being in the art mainstream (#alertpeterperyerimmediately) but still manages to frame the labels and wall texts in a weird mash-up of ideas about how art can be displayed.

Apparently (well according to academics Vanessa M. Patrick of the University of Houston and Henrik Hagtvedt of Boston College in their text Advertising visuals), the use of art in advertisements can be reduced to four main types:

1. Mere Presence versus Integrated Presence
2. Telling a Story with the Artwork versus Creating an Artwork for the Story
3. Mimicking the Original Artwork: Reminding versus Parodying
4. Symbolic Connection versus Substantive Connection

But we all knew that already, right?

Add ons

Artist Etienne Lavie puts art where the ads are.
via Colossal Submissions

Door stoppers

As much as you might dislike having graffiti all over your building there’s not a lot you can do about it. Ok, you can paint it out over and over again but maybe giving way and doing your own version might be smarter. Although any wall on any building is up for grabs there’s still a perverse code that generally leaves  the work of other graffiti artists alone so in Barcelona businesses have taken advantage of this. Many of them hire artists to paint murals on their roller doors in an effort to save being tagged by the my-art-like-it-or-not school. We came across a group of painters hard at work on Sunday and then started noticing these hand-decorated doors all over the city.

Images: top, anti graffiti graffiti-artist sets up to decorate a store's roller door. Below painted doors, Barcelona

One day in the Dominion Post offices

Editor: This digital thing is getting out of hand. We need a big new marketing push

Marketing Director: You betcha.  But I do think our ‘First past the Post’ campaign was willfully misinterpreted

E: Time to move on. We need to promote things we're good at, things we excel in, things we believe to be true (he jots the phrase down for the next day’s editorial)

MD: You mean crime? Right?

E: No, no, I'm talking something fresh. We can't lead with crime all the time

MD: OK, sport. That's the way to go. We do pages and pages of sport

E: That's true but it’s not very classy, is it? I want classy

MD: I suppose news is out of the question? (pause) … how about  business! … (another pause)… no I guess not.

E: I've got it! The world. Now that’s a big topic that we do big things with. I’m thinking THE WORLD.

MD: Hmmm, but is it big enough? We really only give it a page, maybe two if there’s a crisisy…world war sort of thingy ....

E: (tightly) I’m getting slightly tired of this negativity. We need to think different. (a light bulb flashes above his head) Now there's a big idea. ART. We’ll feature ART. I’m told art is totally hot at the moment. We’ll feature ART…. we do have an art section .... don’t we?

MD: Um, I think so. We probably have an art critic…or did we get rid of him? No, I'm thinking we got him back

E: Then art it is. Lead with it. Put it above the crease. Make it the first thing they read and go with it.

And that is what they did.

Pasted

Watching the efforts of public art museums to attract their audiences often makes apparent the chasm between the marketers and the curators. Tried and true ways to pull the people that seem obvious to marketers are often at odds with the programming strategies of the very same institutions. Its crudest form was to be seen in campaigns like the Saatchi & Saatchi billboards displaying fake McCahons to promote the opening of the City Gallery in Wellington 20 years ago.

To promote its latest tranche of exhibitions Te Papa has taken to art punning duos (‘art warming’, ‘art stopping’ etc.) setting ‘ordinary visitor types’ against art works (striking self portrait by Rita Angus / striking photo of a contemporary woman that looks a bit like her). We didn’t say it was subtle, and a major upside is that the poster pasters themselves can zoom it up, which is fun for the rest of us. 
 
In the north, Auckland Art Gallery in the midst of its major commitment to showing contemporary art has decided to advertise that it is …. free.  While this is a classic ticketing venue approach (where tickets are usually paid for) it’s bizarre for an institution that rarely charges for New Zealand exhibitions and never does for general entry. And the marketer’s call to action?  “A summer showcase of new exhibitions and special events”.  Exciting. What ever happened to promoting Freedom Farmers as one of the most ambitious exhibitions of local contemporary art that the Auckland Art Gallery has ever mounted? Its title is only included in the smallest of type as part of a photo credit. Art Breaking.

Images: Top TePapa, bottom AAG

Art in adland: Len Lye

Len Lye was involved with quite a few ads in his time and in 1957 one of them almost won the New York Art Directors Award for best commercial. The one-minute spot was made for Chrysler and features very early (if not the first) examples of fast-paced intentional jump cuts. Thanks to his work with Lye on Rhythm McCann-Erickson ad agency producer James Manilla is known in the industry as the inventor of “squeeze advertising” the one frame shots that paved the way for subliminal advertising. The first ad acknowledged to use subliminal imagery (the words “Eat Popcorn”) was made later in the same year and is attributed to market researcher James Vicary.

The Lye ad Rhythm shows the making of a 1955 Plymouth using an existing Chrysler film Wishes on wheels. You can see a clip from it here including some of the images Lye used.

And the reason Lye didn’t get his Art Directors Award? Chrysler had found the film too abstract and felt that the ‘winking man’ image devalued their product so did not approve its screening. It was only discovered at the last minute (after Lye had been given the nod) that the ad had not in fact played and it was pulled from competition.

Sources: Roger Horrocks' biography of Len Lye, Motor Thrills magazine, McCann Erickson and the forwardlook discussion forums

Art houses

Two sides of the same house block in a Wellington side street advertise Auckland art show, the AAG's Californian design show and the Auckland Art Fair.

On the road

Selling it to us on the road between Dodge City and Emporia

Slip

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam promotes its cafe.

The Italian job

Could anything stop the long queue of serious artists who are waiting to put their work up as collateral on 15 minutes luxuriating in the glamour of the fashion world? Doesn’t look like it. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that artists like Gilbert and George had to make a sneak run to out-of-the-way Tokyo to strut their fashion stuff and avoid a WTF pie in the face from the artworld. 

But now that Jenny Holzer has reached out to Italian Vogue you can forget all that old-school decorum. Even spun out as an-opportunity-to-get-a-wide-audience-not-even-possible-in-the-art-world, Holzer pimping up some of her most powerful TRUISMS including TORTURE IS BARBARIC and sending them down the cat walk is breathtaking. 

And while Holzer agreeing to have her ‘TRUISMS’ spread across the cover and pages of Vogue may have been intended as deep irony, at least one of them still rings true: the abuse of power comes as no surprise.

Anyway, now the gates are wide open it’s clear sailing for that cat food commercial you’ve had your eye on Gerhard, and Roni, the Zyliss Easy-Chop endorsement? Why the hell not. 

Image: H.C. Experimental – Photographer Peter Lindbergh (2b Management) collaborating with conceptual artist Jenny Holzer for the September issue of Vogue Italia. You can see the rest here