For multinational luxury brand Cartier to co-opt half of the main floor of the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) for exposure that money cannot buy is notable, and not just because it puts public assets, including the gallery’s hard-won artistic reputation, at the disposal of private interests.
The funds it brings in may refloat the NGA budget for a new round of acquisitions, or at least repair the leaks in the roof.1 But it makes it hard to distinguish where art ends and marketing begins. This is the global art market at work. The question that the current state of international art poses is what is the difference between art and marketing?
As fashion brands become icons, they accrue social histories that are worth telling, and style notes become elevated to an appraisal of artistic quality, artisanship and technique. The decorative arts have been curated brilliantly by institutions like the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. But in this Cartier exhibition, the celebrity posters do not differ from pictures seen in Vogue; the shock-and-awe around the monetary value of the jewels and the pieces arrayed in display cabinets, which are more like shop windows than museum vitrines, offer a social history of the aristocracy in the manner of Downton Abbey. It all threatened to buy the marketing pitch wholesale.
Head of Art Business Studies at Sotheby’s London Institute, Iain Robertson, has described the art market as the effect of ‘consumerism, cultural nationalism and historicism’, its momentum driven by the ‘economics of taste’.2 This captures an uneven alloy of the desire of the rich for status trinkets, an avenue of money laundering, a commodity for speculation and the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline