The Brand Cage

Several times a year, I put my work in solo or multi-artist shows. It keeps me on my toes as an incentive for generating new work outside of my commissioned illustration work.  Almost without fail, somebody asks me how long it took for me to make "X" piece of art. I usually first ask whether they are a student or serious painter, but I can usually already tell. This bean-counter has a certain look about their face.  I can see their  brain gearing up to crunch the numbers to determine whether the price I have set is in accordance to their preconceived notions about what they think artists should make per hour or per image; it's an amount that is usually stacked against what they themselves make.

My usual response is that it took me 40 years.

In an excellent e-flux article (online art journal) about the political economy of art, contributor, Anton Vidokle, at one point writes about James Abbot McNeil Whistler's libel suit against John Ruskin. Ruskin took Whistler to task in an 1878 review, claiming that Whistler's price for his painting, Nocturne in Black and Gold, was too high a price to ask for a painting that looked so hastily done. Ruskin's argument is that art should be cheap and only reflect the actual time it took to make it. He was suggesting that artists be paid a labor wage for their work based upon an outdated mode of art production, the Guild structure. Asked by the lawyers in the libel suit why he was charging that amount for his painting, Whistler's response was singularly apt: he said that his price reflected the knowledge he had gained over a lifetime of study and practice.

Previous generations of artists who worked as craftsmen within the old European Guild structure relied upon patrons and sponsors to legitimize the work and determine its value. Whistler's libel suit was but one sign of a  paradigm shift away from this hierarchical structure under which artists have traditionally labored.  Bohemian artists of all kinds, no longer bound to the labor wage construct of the Guild declared a divorce from the bourgeois status quo. Artists began their own collectives and their own shows, and often held down other non-art-related jobs that paid the bills. Freed economically and ideologically from the institution of the salon, too, artists could then begin to experiment with style and content in a way that they couldn't before.

There is a modern counterpart happening in today's illustration field. The huge industry that is Publishing is faltering and shifting hard under the weight of the digital onslaught, and fees for art have gone way down.  To compete with dwindling opportunities, some artists have scrambled to "brand" themselves as quickly as they can so that they look professional, as marketable, ready to hawk their product at the most competitive fees possible. With their 30-second elevator pitches memorized, brand-ready students fresh out of art programs are chomping at the bit at a chance to work for a labor wage.  Do you think the "brand" as a business model is the milieu for inspiration and creativity? Do Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons spring to mind? Branding just makes it harder for artists to become untied from the corporate art industries upon which they have had to rely for their livelihoods.

However, in the next ten years the Publishing Industry (or what it was traditionally) will be gone, but the recent "branding" strategy that the Market has pushed many artists and small publishing houses into doing will remain. We can observe that the branding spree has created very segregated genres within the illustration field (ie. the very specific look of the children's market), but we can observe this very same phenomenon within the fine art markets too. I can't tell you how often I have gone to a conference or show only to think that I've seen all of the work before. The markets have their own "look" to them, and artists think that they must tailor their work to fit the market trends and not the other way around. Sadly, this is indeed, the case when it comes to these institutions: conform or be cast out. We have abandoned the bohemian mode in favor of professionalism, marketability, easy categorization, and consumability.

This branding is troubling. Once there in that pigeonhole, if you want to stretch your wings, there's no way out except via a major overhaul. Imagine having a brilliant insight into your work that dramatically changes your style or content overnight. Then what? Do you take five years to gradually shift your work so that it better reflects your ideas? The markets's tight genre structure means that you will still lose those clients/ buyers whether you do it quickly or over a period of time.

Refraining from branding just means that your cage isn't as tight. Perhaps it's time to ask whether the structure itself is at all conducive to real creativity.