(2) The artist as celebrity, who produces a recognizable “product line” (silk-screened flowers, “Spot” paintings, “superflat” riffs on Japanese comics, and inflatable toys rendered in stainless steel) – intended to create value not through the traditional mechanism of scarcity but through media saturation. They include: (1) The ambition of early twentieth-century avant-garde visual culture to assist in transforming political subjectivity by branding revolution, as in the efforts of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Liubov Popova, among many others who aimed to abandon the special preserve of fine art in order to build new forms of advertising, fashion, and theater adequate to the ideals of the USSR. But over the past hundred years, one can track at least four aesthetic models whereby artists mobilized what we now recognize as the brand. But too often the works included in bb9 address only the surfaces of branding – its style – rather than its deep structure.įashion does branding by generating perpetual novelty – a procedure dear to the art world, as well. Branding is not a style, in other words, but rather an operation, which includes both an initial gambit for capturing attention and a long-term, always precarious effort to maintain “customer loyalty.” To take on such procedures, as so many of the artists in this year’s Berlin Biennial (bb9) have done, is a pressing and exhilarating problem – especially for a generation who grew up creating multiple profiles online.

Consequently, to grasp its complexities requires much more than appropriating the rhetorical surfaces of advertising and commercial design. Many dimensions of branding are invisible in the final product itself: ranging from initial market research to data on consumption patterns. In an attention economy, branding is relevant to art because it exemplifies how images create collective identifications, if not quite genuine publics, through their representation of products or experiences. A brand commands attention by producing and widely disseminating an instrumentalized image.

Branding, I say to myself, isn’t so easy. Walking around my Manhattan neighborhood, it occurs to me that something like three generations of frozen yogurt stores have come and gone in the past ten years.

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