Richard Wollheim, the British philosopher of art stated that although the art industry is constitutionally bound to cover the new and uncover beauty, individual artists have been bowing to a stylistic conservatism for the past 100 years leading to a lack of new images of aspiration and desire. Furthermore, the modern art worlds arbitrary and unpredictable character had stripped from artists any clear sense of what they should be doing stylistically. This forces them to stick with what initially brought them success.
Wollheim synthesized analytic philosophy, psychoanalysis and the study of painting to develop aesthetic insights. His analysis of painting involved a re-interpretation of the artist’s intentions viewed through his framework involving Freudian depth psychology. The process was called ”Seeing In”. The technique could in effect blur the boundaries between high art and mass media, since intentions like ideological critique could enter the interpretation which featured what Wollheim called ”increased cognitive flexibility”. Warhol could make art of a minimalist nature ( phrase coined by Wollheimer) leading to a merchandising and ”branding” of his of production. The link between visual art and its favorable influence on brand image perceptions was understood by Warhol as a post-capitalistic phenomenon of commodification of anything that could traded with legal tender.
Barbara Kruger
As Guy Damman of the Guardian remarked, ”Art students are taught in the main to come up with a brand and make it stick. Artists…seem increasingly timid about releasing anything that might dilute or disrupt their carefully nurtured brands”. An institutional conservatism on the part of the art establishment will reinforce complacency by nature and despite mission statements to the contrary. This is similar, to the financial crisismeltdown and top banking executives make mea-culpas they were unaware of the existence of CDO’s and asset backed commercial paper being the culprits and also the manna for their inflated salries and perks. However, the ability to reproduce visual art of a universal human nature as a representation of timeless newness is a high bar to straddle. There is a limit on how many times one can be hit by lightning.
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It seems utopic, but Damman’s description is ” I mean beauty in the sense of the feeling you get when your mind collides head on with the world, when the desire to live bursts through you in response to a sight or sound that powerfully makes sense of the world and our place in it.” The relation of visual art and luxury perceptions can have in marketing parlance , a positive influence on brand image. Its likely that art and advertising will become increasingly synonymous despite the inherent absence of complementarity and fit. More companies will use art as part of a branding and design strategy. Pop art will be appropriated and thereafter known as ”prop” art.
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