The Artist as a Brand: in our brand driven world

Has originality been lost in our post-modern society?

This is the question that comes to mind after reading Celia Lury's review of Damien Hurst's artistic practice in ‘Contemplating a Self-Portrait as a Pharmacist: A Trade Mark Style of Doing Art and Science'.

‘the conditions under which creativity, invention and discovery are recognized are being altered.’ (Lury: 106)

‘Original’: ‘Hirst is not so much concerned with being an origin or even with originality, as with the use of a name to mark an organisation of relations between things, with assemblages and reassemblages, appropriations and incorporations.’ (Lury: 95)

Today everything is repackaged, reconstituted, re-emerged as something new with a new label attached. Artists now seem to work through a system of looking just for new links and relations between things that have come and been exhibited before. Artists seem to have to identify their worth by creating a new way of looking at a somewhat old idea. It is about finding the new way of interpreting the old: this is only where we can be original.

‘In physics, you know, if they can’t find the answer they want, they change the question. As long as your prepared to do that … there’s nothing you can’t do.’ (Lury: 107)

In the article similarities concerning this artistic practice are shown in the pharmaceutical market, the example given of a new remedy for indigestion ‘Gaviscon’ where marketers looked at creating a new way of re-phrasing the consumers problem of heartburn (that exisited in a stale and monopolised market), and a provided a solution to this problem, thus ‘inventing a new problem and offering a new solution’. (Lury: 100)

This idea of forced reinterpretation could be seen as a part of the post-modern condition and an effect of globalisation. It seems with the increased flow of communication and information everyone has knowledge on everything, everything has been done somewhere in the world before, and we could perhaps now all be dismissed as imitators. Although it could be said that nothing is new, we still strive for originality. Art seems to now be original in its placement (conceptually), not so much in its form.

It appears we can also find our originality or worth, as shown by Lury, through the idea of the artist as a brand.

A brand is an image. Identifying with a brand shows the consumer identifies with the encompassing ideologies that are present with this brand, what is stands for and is desirable to the consumer. The flow of relations between products and how these relations are presented is the brand, the way it connects products together.

Damien Hirst is shown to be a well formulated brand. His ‘products’ are desirable to the consumer because of how he has marketed himself and the image that he encompasses.

Although to me this direct link between ‘the artist’ and ‘the brand’ is a recent one, the further I examine at it, the more it seems consistent with our current practice; ‘Successful artists can be thought of as brand managers, actively engaged in developing, nurturing, and promoting themselves as recognizable “products” in the competitive cultural sphere.’ (Schroder: 1)

In our commodity and consumer driven world, creating a brand around ourselves as artists is a way to be original and bring attention to our work, and if we wish to be successful, a persuasive and significant future direction for us all.




Lury, Celia. “Contemplating a Self-portrait as a Pharmacist: A Trade Mark Style of Doing Art and Science.” Theory, Culture & Society. London: SAGE. Vol. 22(1): 93-110.

Schroeder, Jonathan E. "The Artist and the Brand". European Journal of Marketing. http://ssrn.com/abstract=690270: 2005. Vol. 39(11): 1291-1305.