While leading Art Basel, I worked closely with many luxury-brand partners including UBS, BMW, Audemars Piguet, Cartier, Davidoff, and Ruinart. Since going independent, I have applied that experience bridging culture and commerce to working with companies such as Sanlorenzo, Prada Group, Therme Arts and KEF, the UK heritage audio brand. Projects have included long-term cultural strategy, content programming, designing prizes and serving on juries, as well as collaborations on specific artistic productions.
Here’s my take: Any brand working within the art world needs to 1) Understand with which topics they want to engage, 2) Find artists whose work has an authentic relationship to those topics, 3) Support the artist in making new work, 4) Minimize logo bombing, 5) Humbly host the opening festivities, then 6) Create great digital content around the project and leverage it vastly.
The corporation thus becomes the artist’s patron, not their boss. Because artists should never play product designers for luxury brands, a tactic that undermines the very thing for which the brand is paying. (Unless that artist is Takashi Murakami - the exception who proves the rule.)
