Is Art Sponsorship Going Out of Style?

Photo-A Must Have~!
Richard Prince designs for Louis Vuitton














ART + Fashion+Design+ Architecture=???


We here at ARTmostfierce feel like some of these relationships(sponsors) at times can be a success for both parties but also, it can work against the artist diminishing and commercializing the artist work value.
It is a good way for artist to become a brand and I guess, the best example of it is Takashi Murakami. The nature of his art flirts appropriately with mass production and commercialism in a quite similar but never as successful as the only master of it ...Andy Warhol!
Please read an article by ArtInfo throwing more light into the topic.

Enjoy!



NEW YORK—When Palestinian artist Emily Jacir accepted the 2008 Hugo Boss Prize last week, the champagne-sipping crowd at the Guggenheim Museum radiated all the glitter expected at a confluence of the fashion and art worlds. But that glitter, given the present economic state, also gave the event the indulgent feel of a relic from a bygone gilded age.
While partnerships between fashion brands and the arts are part of a longstanding, mutually beneficial game of glamour marketing, it’s not clear that such a strategy would still be effective in today’s economy. But that would depend on the brand’s goals. While companies from Louis Vuitton to Gap use art-world collaborations to create and move merchandise, an approach that is prey to fluctuations in consumer spending, Hugo Boss’s strategy — to create long-term associations with art and arts institutions in buyers’ minds — is less susceptible to tough times.

For Hugo Boss, involvement in the arts is based on a somewhat traditional model. “Our arts sponsorship emotionalizes the brand,” said Hjördis Kettenbach, Hugo Boss’s head of corporate communications and arts sponsorship.

Since 1996, the German fashion label has partnered with the Guggenheim Foundation to award the biannual Hugo Boss Prize, which recognizes a mid-career contemporary artist with a $100,000 award and a solo show in the New York museum. Hugo Boss is also a major supporter of other exhibits at the Guggenheim — including, coincidentally, the museum’s current exhibit “theanyspacewhatever.”

But for all of Boss’s sponsorship efforts, equally significant is what it doesn’t do: cross-promote its own products through the arts. There will be no Hugo Boss scarves with prints designed by Emily Jacir, nor T-shirts with the artwork of Jacir and her fellow nominees. The reason for that is based on a firm belief in boundaries. “This is the art world, and what we do is fashion,” Kettenbach said. “If you mix it too much, it gets too commercial. We don’t want to lose our good reputation with the art world.”

Of course, commercial tie-ins have certainly worked for Louis Vuitton, which boasts an enthusiastic dialogue between artists and fashion design. In 2003, Takashi Murakami created a wildly popular series of handbags for the brand; last year, as part of the artist’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Vuitton sponsored a shop containing Murakami’s designs that was controversially located within the exhibition itself.

Richard Prince, too, was invited by Louis Vuitton artistic director Marc Jacobs to design a series of handbags for the spring 2008 collection; at the runway show, the bags were presented on models dressed to look like the subjects of Prince’s “Nurse” paintings. In January, the company hosted a party to celebrate the bags at the Guggenheim, which was hosting a survey of Prince’s work at the time; the bags were available for pre-order at the event.

On the mass-market end of the fashion spectrum, Gap entered the fine-art mix earlier this year with T-shirts designed by artists included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. And on the occasion of this year's presidential election, the brand invited artists including Kara Walker and John Waters to design “Vote” buttons that sold for $5 each.

But Hugo Boss is having none of it: no sales, no crossover merchandising, no discernible spike in receipts at its Manhattan stores after the award ceremony at the Guggenheim, according to Kettenbach. “This is not our aim,” she said. “It’s more for the image and the brand.”

That image is meant to attract a shopper who has an interest in luxury, clothing, art — and most important, in aesthetic values. Someone who cares equally about what’s on the body, the table, and the walls, but doesn’t need to shout about it. The Vuitton customer, on the other hand, is more interested in communicating to the world that she knows the work of Prince and Murakami — she wants it on the wall and on her shoulder, too.

To read more about it please click on link below!

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/29515/is-art-sponsorship-going-out-of-style/?page=2