The Power of Publicity : How Media Savvy Has Overtaken Creativity in the Art World

In October 2001 a new Damien Hirst’s exhibition opened at Eyestorm Gallery in central London. It was not one of Hirst most spectacular exhibitions, there were no sharks in formaldehyde or diamond encrusted skulls, but Hirst still succeeding in making the front page of several daily newspapers, as well as being mentioned in news bulletins on television and making online news headlines.

It was a PR success story par excellence, but the story wasn’t specifically about Hirst’s exhibition, the exhibition acquired its stellar publicity thanks to a clever, secondary narrative, about the destruction of an “improvised” work of art that Hirst had created at the exhibition’s launch party using beer bottles, ashtrays, and other rubbish. Eyestorm even supplied media outlets with a photograph of Hirst posing over the beer bottles with studied, head-bowed, creative genius.
 
The fate of this improvised work of art, as detailed by the exhibition’s publicists, was what really got the media salivating with all manner of ironic headlines. Apparently an over-zealous cleaner went into the gallery the next morning and threw  all the post-party rubbish away, only to discover that some of it was actually a valuable work of Hirstian art.
 
As the Guardian reported: “Staff were dispatched to find the bin-bags in the rubbish, and salvaged the various objects, which they used to reconstruct the installation from photographs taken earlier.”
 
The publicity was brilliantly conceived because it juxtaposed the concept of modern art with that of rubbish/garbage quite literally, and a gullible media pounced onto the story like lab-rats onto a slice of rancid cheese. Whether it was a true or manufactured publicity story is anyone’s guess.
 
Hirst rose to fame almost ten years earlier thanks, partly, to his skill as a self-publicist and the canny marketing skills of his art dealer Jay Joplin. Joplin spent some of his formative years in New York during the art boom of the mid-80s, learning how hype can be employed to help sell mediocre work to rich and impressionable collectors. If you say it well, and say it often enough, and loud enough, people really start to believe it.
 
Joplin returned to London and, in the early 90s, he almost single-handedly pulled the spotlight across the pond and onto the Young British Artists. The YBAs were young and brash, they swore and drank too much and offended the establishment, a few of them were creating very interesting work, some of them were not, but all of them created a fantastic, collective media story.

To get an understanding of the importance of self-promotion in the art world today all you need do is log onto Amazon and see how many books have been written on the subject. The titles are all fairly pedestrian: Art Marketing 101, The Artist's Marketing and Action Plan Workbook, Fine Art Publicity, Self-Promotion for the Creative Person.

Most fine art schools today no longer teach drawing as a compulsory subject, which makes sense, given that figurative drawing skills are about as relevant to contemporary art as bows and arrows are to contemporary warfare. Instead of old-school drawing subjects, art schools now have units that teach students to talk critically about their work. It’s no good simply producing art these days, you need to be able to promote it with a refined language.

 The Fine Artist's Guide to Marketing and Self-Promotion puts it rather bluntly: “To be a successful artist, you will need to have a personal aesthetic philosophy. In order to write an artistic statement or define your art, you must come to terms with this. If you do not have one then it would be advisable to start thinking about it. Without this foundation, the art will be viewed as superficial.”

You might sense from the author’s imperative, “you must come to terms with this”,  that many artists are less than comfortable about promoting themselves and their art. Sometimes pride can tell an artist that selling oneself lacks integrity, that the work should speak for itself.

When Picasso was asked to explain his cubist painting he said: "The goal I proposed myself in making cubism? To paint and nothing more." Would Picasso’s reticence have condemned cubism to the bin of superficiality in today’s market? If the Fine Artist’s Guide is anything to go by, then yes. Do the market requirements for self-promotion mean that only the brashest and most confident artists will succeed, regardless of the quality of their work? I don’t think so, but it is a circumstance that can turn a mediocre artist into a household name. There are many incredible artists who have succeeded, in the sense that they make a decent living from their art, but they are almost entirely unrecognized in wider media circles because they refuse to promote themselves with tenacity.

A good example is the Australian artist Cameron Hayes. Hayes paints incredibly detailed, sprawling canvases that are filled with complex visual narratives. Each paintings takes him several months to complete, which means he only completes three or four paintings per year. As a consequence, and despite being pursued for several years by Stuart Purvis,  the owner of Australia’s most prestigious gallery (Australian Galleries), Hayes refused to exhibit any of his work in commercial galleries until the age of twenty-seven, by which time he’d finished enough paintings that he felt he could afford to sell a few. Hayes’s work is astonishing, and has garnered him enough international recognition to allow him to live comfortably as a painter. He is represented in New York by Ronald Feldman, who brought the work of German artist Joseph Beuys to America for the first time, and who often exhibited Warhol’s work. ‘Artists like Cameron Hayes only come around every generation or so,’ Feldman told me several years ago, ‘I knew that as soon as I saw one of his paintings.’

Despite this, Hayes remains almost completely unknown. He is in many ways a publicist’s dream: a great artist and a fascinating, original and eloquent speaker, but he has never contacted the media once to feed them an angle. In fact, he has never really done anything to promote his work apart from hold a handful of exhibitions in commercial galleries.

Art publicity is not a modern phenomenon. There were references to great artists in classical texts, Pliny wrote about ancient Greek artists, for example, but it was not until the Renaissance that artists began to gain serious publicity. This was partly because of the invention of the printing press, but also because of the undeniable genius of the artists working during that period. Before the 15th Century artists were generally regarded as little more than craftsmen, only marginally superior to the people who made furniture and rugs; during the Renaissance they were reimagined seen as super-human characters, immortals touched by the hand of God.
 
More than any other text, Varsari’s Lives succeeded in giving Italy’s Renaissance artists lasting fame throughout Europe. The term “Renaissance”, now used to denote the period between the 14th and 16th Centuries, was itself adopted from Vasari’s writing.
The book is still in print today and is still immensely readable; it is the first and arguably the greatest publicity coup ever conceived and produced in the art world. It generated a popular new literary genre - the artist biography - and writers all over Europe began to write about art ands artists like never before.
 
But Vasari’s book was not self-promotion. The idea that a Renaissance artist might print pamphlets containing detailed explications of their aesthetic philosophy and hand them out to the public would have been preposterous to artists and the public alike. It would have smelt of desperation and insecurity. Renaissance artists liked to give the impression of allowing the work do the talking for them, although behind the scenes they were often keen self-promoters. Michelangelo was not wholly pleased with what Vasari had written about him in the first edition of the Lives, for example, and so he encouraged one of his admirers, Ascanio Condivi, to record a more flattering version of his life’s achievements. He would have undoubtedly tried to manipulate journalists if they had existed in Rome at the time.
 
By the 20th Century artists had become brands, and “brand awareness” was facilitated by a competitive mass media desperate for stories that would help sell advertising space to businesses. Many artists attempted to negotiate this new and powerful means of generating publicity, while some stood aloof and turned away from the publicity machine. Dali started off looking quite the canny media operator but, by the end of his life, he looked like a bit of a fool, at best, at worst, a sell-out. Duchamp feigned indifference until, finally, in his last years, he leaped out of his box spectacularly and won over a whole new generation of fans. Warhol, who had a background in commercial art, managed to create a post-war art brand that was as instantly recognizable around the world as the celebrities and commercial products he depicted in his work.
 
Then came the 80s. The art market boomed in the 80s partly because a lot of people suddenly had a lot more cash in their pocket and, rather than leave their liquidity sitting in the bank, they wanted to invest it. Art became a popular option because it not only promised a great return on the initial investment, it also gave bankers and brokers a bit of cultural kudos when they hosted dinner parties. In the 80s everything went hyper-crazy and there were far more people wanting to buy great art than there were great artists. Robert Hughes once observed that under these circumstances, “The market must therefore figure out ways of selling mediocre-to-bad art at prices that are high enough to stifle artist dissent.”
 
 What New York art dealers discovered in the 80s (and what a young Jay Joplin then brought back with him to London) was that when demand for art was high thanks to a burgeoning class of nouveaux riche collectors, the media was a potent tool that could be used to generate hype around an artist; hype that effectively drowned out too many questions or concerns about the artistic value of the work.
 
And the greatest type of hype is, as Robert Hughes noted, money hype. Anyone can measure the value of money, it’s easy, and people today are always price conscious; thus an artist’s intrinsic value is easier to sell to a credulous public if the artist’s work sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
 
When Damien Hirst announced to the media a few years ago that his next work was going to be a diamond-studded piece of conceptual bling, he quickly explained that it was going to be the most expensive work of art ever created. He  even explained the Concept of the Bling, just in case people were wondering. "I just want to celebrate life by saying to hell with death. What better way of saying that than by taking the ultimate symbol of death and covering it in the ultimate symbol of luxury, desire and decadence?"
 
The conceptual soundbyte - nobody does it better than Mr Hirst. It’s a salient example of how crude media-hype has become – it’s about money, and the hype starts even before the art has been produced.
 
Imagine Picasso contacting the media to explain his aesthetic philosophy before he began his first cubist paintings:
“Yeah, is that Le Monde, I want to tell you about this radical new cubist painting I’m doing. It’s all about perspective, and the way we see things differently. I want to convey in my work the idea that truth is like a many-sided crystal, and that there is more than one way of viewing an object, and what better way of saying this than by taking an image and breaking it up into cubes-like shapes?”
 
Of course, the type language used by artists today is far more complex than the example above. Contemporary artists who publicise their “aesthetic philosophy” tend to use loquacious, sophisticated and slightly impenetrable phrases. I’m a writer, I think I’m pretty good with words, but I’ve been to some exhibitions in the past fifteen years or so, and read the catalogue, and thought, what the fuck is this artist going on about?
 
Artist’s feel a certain pressure to be more intellectual than philosophers these days, and the generic art exhibition catalogue is replete with phrases that would make Immanuel Kant scratch his head (that’s what I tell myself, anyway). The idea now seems to be that the more abstract and convoluted one’s artistic theories, the more impressive one’s art will appear to the public.
 
More than ten years ago I reviewed a rather bland exhibition of photo-realist work and the catalogue claimed that the artist’s work, “indicates how (the artist) appropriates the strong connotive edge of advertising in which signs can be juxtaposed to create messages which belie appearances.” Now, there’s a lot going on in that sentence, to be sure, but underneath all the appropriating, connotating, juxtaposing, creating and belying, all that was being said was that the artist’s work looks at how advertising uses false imagery to sell products (like, wow). It’s a bit like dressing mutton up as lamb, and it seems to have evolved into a fairly established convention, to the point where the exegesis is more important than the work of art it describes.
 
What posterity will make of today’s most celebrated artists is anyone’s guess. Contemporary art will always be more contentious than the work of the Old Masters, and that’s not a bad thing at all. Art that generates debate is always more interesting than art that is almost universally considered exceptional. There are a lot of fantastic conceptual artists producing amazing work today: Cornelia Parker, Anne Hamilton and Cildo Meireles, to name but a few. These artists may not be the most effective media operators working in today’s publicity-mad art world, they may not be opening restaurants or reviewing hotels for glossy magazines, but they are still making great art, and getting positive critical recognition for it.
 
Evan Maloney lives in Poland. His first novel, Tofu Landing, is published in the UK in early 2010 and looks at the relationship between media, celebrity and contemporary art. He has worked as an art critic and currently works as a script consultant with several European film production companies.