PATRON TAINT?

How do the worlds of art and commerce mutually nourish and vex each other? CHRISTINA KO explores the intersection of creativity and branding in the context of modern society

IT ONCE FELL to the coffers of church and state to buttress the livelihood of artists and art, so it seems only fair that today, with consumerism having seeped into the roles of both royalty and religion, brands take up the cause as their own. When exactly the buck passed from Louis XIV to Louis Vuitton is not clear, but ask any person related to the world of art and they will assent.

In Hong Kong, where shopping is the national sport and commerce dictates the rules of society, this model has been particularly well embraced – just as pundits decried our gleaming finance capital a cultural desert, 2008 came along and in stepped the Hong Kong International Art Fair (ART HK). With the fair came all the elements we were said to be missing – international galleries, globally recognised artists, regional art-lovers and a Hong Kong public that, it turns out, was willing to take time out of mall-roaming to come and drink in some culture.

ART HK has in the ensuing years carved out a cosy spot in the city’s calendar; this year the fair grew to the tune of 30 percent, with more than 250 galleries from 38 countries spread out over two floors of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. None of this, of course, would have been possible without the initial sponsorship of the now-defunct Lehman Brothers. When the bank unexpectedly collapsed in late 2008, the fair was left without patronage in its second year, and though the show did go on, as fair director Magnus Renfrew notes, “It wasn’t easy.” Deustche Bank signed on in the third year, offering a five-year commitment. The corporate contribution is, of course, mainly financial, and Renfrew points out, “It’s an event of cultural as well as commercial significance.

Deustche Bank provides significant financial support, but it’s about how the bank and ART HK have a common goal of trying to bring high-net-worth individuals to Hong Kong. It’s fantastic for them for client entertainment and client acquisition opportunities, and it’s great for our galleries to have these people there to buy art and sustain their development.”

Although this partnership was inaugurated but a year ago, the bank’s Head of Communications Asia Pacific Region Michael West adds, “We’ve been involved with art for many years, and we’ve built up a collection of 54,000 works of art. It’s the largest private collection, I think, in the world. That work is displayed in the bank offices, in public institutions, some by way of loan, sometimes touring shows. Obviously there’s an intersection with some of the fairs – Hong Kong is an important one; we’ve been involved with Frieze Art Fair [in London] for a long time.

“Art in the workplace was certainly adopted early in Germany, in the factories. Germany was at the forefront of that movement to humanize the workplace. But at the same time, obviously, there’s an element of support to the local art community. Arts patronage has a long history, and banks see themselves as being part of the community. I see it as both part of our corporate social responsibility programme, and of course, our branding.”

A sweep of the bank’s offices in West Kowloon’s ICC shows an accomplished collection of local art, both acquired and commissioned. On the local front, there’s an impressive showing: your Chow Chun-fais, Wilson Shiehs and cross-disciplinary studio MAP Office works, and even a fitting and witty Tsang Kin-wah, whose patterned text wall installations may seem out of place in a staid corporate office, until the trademark profane idioms have been traded for thoughts on finance, submitted by staff themselves (and believe it or not, not all of those fall outside the four-letter realm).

Deustche Bank isn’t the only financial institution to ally itself with a major art partner. Despite its affiliation with trusts and tax-planning guru The Sovereign Group, the Sovereign Art Foundation this year turned to private bank Julius Baer to sponsor its Sovereign Asian Art Award, which encompassed a prize, gala dinner and auction of shortlisted works. The marriage, both parties insist, is mutually beneficial. In previous interviews with Prestige Hong Kong, Julius Baer CEO Hong Kong & North Asia Andrea Benenati has underlined the strong link between his bank and the arts – in particular, the cause of up-and-coming artists, dovetailing nicely with the Prize’s mission statement of “recognizing the most groundbreaking and influential emerging artists of our time,” according to Howard Bilton, chairman of The Sovereign Group and founder of the Art Foundation.

The relationship began with nothing more innocuous than Bilton and Benenati discovering a shared love of emerging wines. From underappreciated wines they moved to art and other topics – Bilton was charmed by the idea of working with a corporation that didn’t require endless proposals, head-office approval and a quantification of sponsorship value; Benenati, meanwhile, salivated over the chance to bolster Julius Baer’s commitment to art, while giving clients access to exclusive opportunities in the art world. “The sponsorship is Julius Baer’s first step in supporting the development of Asia’s art scene. We hope to extend our goal of promoting cultural vibrancy in Hong Kong and we will continue to look for suitable opportunities in the local market that align with our global sponsorship strategy,” he says.

“[Julius Baer] also,” notes Bilton, “publicise our events to their clients and bring people along to the events – the exhibition and dinner – thereby broadening our support base.” While Baer is not the first sponsor of the Prize, Bilton adds, “The luxury brands we have worked with have been very particular about every aspect of the event, whereas banks tend to let you get on with it. They both bring something different to the party. Our ideal sponsorship package would be split equally between a bank and a luxury brand.”

In 2007, it was Louis Vuitton that opened its monogrammed piggy bank to The Sovereign Art Foundation. You can count on one hand the number of brands that have exhibited the long-standing commitment to art that this fashion conglomerate has – its engagement has ranged from straightforward sponsorships to product collaborations, and from the launch of brand art galleries to the publication of a coffee-table book chronicling the history of these various associations, a tome titled Louis Vuitton: Art, Fashion and Architecture. And even fewer brands have managed to integrate art so seamlessly into their brand identities.

The house’s creative director, Marc Jacobs, is in no small part responsible for this overt love affair. His personal immersion in the sphere of contemporary art led him in 2001 to approach Stephen Sprouse to work together on a collection, an artist’s rendition of the Vuitton monogram. In the wake of that success came projects – with Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince – unlike those previously undertaken under the Louis Vuitton name. The world of fashion had, by this time, gained some legitimacy under the umbrella of art, with archival museum exhibitions and fledgling crossover ventures, though never on this scale. “Each of [the artists],” notes a spokesperson for the brand, “worked directly and freely on the house’s products. Few brands have dared push the dialogue between luxury and contemporary art to such an extent.”

With Murakami, the invasion was two-way – while he applied his manga-influenced brush to the luxury handbags, he also borrowed the LV monogram for his canvas. The collaboration bore an exhibition at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, which also housed, perhaps sacrilegiously, a temporary operational Vuitton boutique: “the pinnacle of the collaboration between the art and luxury world,” according to the maison.

Closer to home, the fashion house brought to Hong Kong the Louis Vuitton: A Passion for Creation exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum of Art in 2009, an unprecedented hit that combined international superstars à la Hirst and Koons alongside a specially selected emerging “Hong Kong Seven.” In many ways this paved the way for the creation of the gallery Espace Louis Vuitton in Tsim Sha Tsui, which the house calls “a culmination of Louis Vuitton’s long-standing associations with the art world…conceived as a space of cultural exchanges and encounters through which the house’s creativity and diversity can receive their fullest expression.”

It’s fitting in this context, then, that in Louis Vuitton: Art, Fashion and Architecture, the criticJill Gasparina writes, “Whether the links to theartistic world are overtly commercial or moresubtly expressed (like the exhibitions in the EspaceLouis Vuitton), they are always motivatedby marketing concerns. Denying this connectionwould be naïveté, pure and simple.”

While once upon a time it may have been considered taboo to express this relationship so candidly, with the proliferation of business-minded and commerce-conscious artists of the Warholian movement, this stigma has faded. And who is to say whether these artists are playing into the clutches of branding, or professing social commentary just as they participate? Muses Gasparina: “Has cultural creation within major capitalistic corporations become the most subversive movement of all?”

Perhaps, agrees the progressive multimedia artist Cao Fei. “In some cases they depend on one another while at other times they despise each other. Indeed, it is an interesting paradox,” she says. Cao is well placed to comment on issues such as these due to her constant immersion in alternative worlds – her renowned Second Life artistic creations toy with the boundaries of dream and reality, through which she occasionally explores the importance of commerce in a rapidly advancing society. “Many ‘art projects’ produced by different international brands are not sincerely to promote art; rather, their ultimate goal is to advertise and promote their products.

“Contemporary consumer society created people who live for consumer products, who spend money on consumer products, or those who are the products, whereas contemporary art focuses more on overlooking, epitomising, reflecting and judging consumerism, making us reflect on questions like where we come from and where we will go.” In this framework, the relationship between art and branding is not so much a love-hate one, but a subjective and cautious hand-holding – each needs and desires the other in order to function and, more importantly, move forward, but neither fully understands the nature of this symbiosis.

Cao herself wavers between the virtues and ills – on the one hand, she asks that brands “lessen their focus on branding,” but she too has worked with brands ranging from Herthe mès to Shiseido to Siemens, not to mention a fashion shoot with her Second Life avatar, China Tracy, for China’s Modern Weekly, inspired by name-brand couture.

One example she cites of a happy medium is the collaboration between Hugo Boss and the Guggenheim Museum in New York for the Hugo Boss Prize. This alliance began 15 years ago, with a substantial award of US$100,000 granted every other year by a committee of jurors made up of curators and critics that remains entirely independent from the fashion brand. For Hugo Boss, the commitment is an emotional one, which leans towards the softer side of marketing. “Both [art and brands] participate and inspire each other,” says Hjördis Kettenbach, head of corporate communications and arts sponsorship for the brand. “By supporting [contemporary art] in the context of longterm partnerships, we have the possibility to support our corporate culture actively.”

Indeed, he elaborates that no concrete brand-art collaborations of the fashion-design ilk have ever been realised, nor are any likely in the near future. “The fashion world serves rather as an inspirational source for the Hugo Boss Prize,” he says.

While this mode of arts patronage has occasionally been deemed outdated, especially amid a paradigm of in-your-face collaborations, and also if we recall the tough financial times of the not-too-recent past, it’s a mode of macro-branding that has been undertaken on home turf by local jewellery house Qeelin. Like Vuitton’s Jacobs, Qeelin Creative Director Dennis Chan has an intimate love of art that has propelled efforts on a corporate level. Though the company has worked in the past with universities and students, fostering growth through collaborative learning projects, the upcoming Caring Robot campaign and Qeelin Art Award are the first major public initiative. To mark the launch of the Roobot Collection of jewellery, Chan invited students from selected universities in Hong Kong, Beijing and Paris to submit sketches for a “caring robot” sculpture, “a robot that is sculpted from love, that bridges that gap with humans,” says the designer. The 10 shortlisted sketches will be exhibited in an atrium space sponsored by ifc and then auctioned off to benefit Unicef.

“If I really wanted to do marketing, I’d spend the money on a billboard,” Chan says. “But since Qeelin is pretty much the first Chinese luxury brand, we have an obligation. Qeelin was born of a dream in my youth, and I think we need to foster that opportunity for others – to give the younger generation a dream, and proximity to what luxury brands are doing is an example.”

A regular on the art, design and jewellery circuits, Chan is rarely shy when it comes to expressing his opinions, and he’s well aware of the importance of retaining unadulterated, pure visual art today.

On the question of whether brands are sullying the good name of art, he scoffs, “I’ve always felt that Qeelin represents wearable art. Design is beauty, function…the robot, and some of our other nostalgic designs, those have an emotional touch to them that makes them transcend just design.

“A lot of megabrands are using art within their marketing objectives. Some people think that it’s just promotional, but remember, the creators do appreciate art – Marc Jacobs loves manga; that’s how he discovered Murakami. Take a look at pop art – what Warhol did was design. He took an iconic portrait and changed the colours. It’s not necessary to distinguish it, is it? What pushes a brand forward at the end of the day is still art and design. Art, design, commerce…it’s all inter-related. Even today, people talk about art as investments alongside stocks and property and cars and yachts. But it’s an investment with an emotional feature, and that’s not something that we really need to fight. For a megabrand, it’s a way for them to offer a more emotional connection, instead of just advertising all the time – like Chanel’s Mobile Art. But for that to happen, the people working within the brand must appreciate art to begin with.”