‘Teaching the Science of Selling Art’ from the IHT:

“As the global art market has ballooned into an industry turning over an estimated $25 billion or more a year in sales, a subsidiary business has grown alongside, training those who hope to make a living from the commerce of art.

Some conventional universities and art schools have introduced art history programs with an art market component. These include the École du Louvre in Paris, which now includes an auctioneer training course in its undergraduate and graduate programs; the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, which this year introduced a masters degree in art museum curating; and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, which offers a masters in Art Market Principles and Practice.

Auction houses are also in on the act. Highly intensive, often highly priced – with fees running into the tens of thousands of dollars – but relatively easy to access in terms of academic entry requirements, the auction house schools immerse their students five days a week in the world of art, with an eye on the practical business aspects.

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The mainstreaming of culture continues apace!

The Future Laboratory have published a report for this month’s Esquire magazine exploring what it means to be a man in 2008. The emerging profile, ‘The Menaissance Man’ (or ‘Intelli-gent’, as Esquire puts it):

“…Men who are open to new experiences, not prepared to conform to set life-stages, happy to embrace a work/life balance that allows us to be more socially mobile, while also being more culturally aware about things such as literature, history, design, lifestyle, fashion and travel. In the survey a huge proportion of readers expressed a keen interest in art and culture… In terms of how we define masculinity itself… we want to be intellectually, as well as physically, muscular…”

In the midst of this global financial turmoil, CNN reports that expensive art is suffering but at the Affordable Art Fair, sales are up. ‘Low price art pieces’ are hot.

We’ve had enough of ‘choose what you want’, now it’s time for ‘tell me what to choose’. Whether it’s listening to friends or to trusted influencers, Curation is hitting the mainstream.

By now, sites such as Last.fm have firmly established the idea of social recommendations: “Every track you play will tell your Last.fm profile something about what you like. It can connect you to other people who like what you like – and recommend songs from their music collections and yours too.”

Social search is on it’s way too, from start-ups through to Google. Techcrunch recently posted a video of ‘the future of Google search’, complete with a Digg-style interface that allows users to vote search results up or down, comment on results, and prioritise whose comments/recommendations they listen to (see below for a demo).

Back in the real world, club nights like Matter London are bringing in specialists to ‘curate’ the evening. One recent import was LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Pat Mahoney, who have been running a party in New York, ‘Special Disco Version’. The mix of DJs and artists they curated for one night only at Matter included Brazilian light and visual artists AVAF (Assume Vivid Astro Focus), who usually only do shows in art galleries.

Bestival, the boutique music festival on the Isle of Wight, is proudly “curated by BBC Radio 1’s Rob da Bank” and his wife, Josie. According to their intro, “It’s Rob and Josie da Bank’s creative vision that sets Bestival apart. Whilst the massive musical brain of Rob ensures the Bestival line-up is the most eclectic you’ll ever experience, it’s Josie’s creative wand that casts its magic over Bestival land. From the most original boutique campsite experience, to the Bollywood Cocktail Bar, fancy dress en mass and even a Hidden Disco, it’s this uniqueness that makes Bestival a wondrous world of discovery and adventure that will inspire peace, love and dancing not only in September but all year round…”

Since curation is the bread and butter of galleries and museums, the timing’s perfect to feed the mainstream hunger for ‘curated’ offers from authoritative influencers.

We talk about understanding your punters a lot on here, in order to meet them where they’re at rather than expecting them to go out of their way to come to you. Here’s a store that just seems to ‘get’ 11-year-old girls and their sock-wearing habits.

Fresh from conquering US shoppers, Littlemissmatched.co.uk has arrived in the UK. They only sell mismatched socks, in hundreds of varieties, and in packets of three, “(so you’ll never be without a pair a socks ever again!)”.

Seth Godin makes two great points to take home from this: 1) Turning socks into collectibles is a simple, obvious idea that many people would have been too scared to try; 2) Littlemissmatched.com are changing socks from a low-margin, low-interest commodity into a higher-margin, high-interest fashion.

As usual, it’s the simplest of ideas…

Not content seeing museums get all the glory for breaking free from the confines of their walls, our global public library partners are keen to set the pace.

First up, California’s Library-a-Go-Go machine, installed in four BART locations by Contra Costa County Library (CCCL). The machine comes from a supplier called Distec, and looks comfortingly like a bank ATM. Books are accessed via library card, and returned to the machine. It stores up to 400 books.

Back home in Sweden, these book dispensers – under an alternative name of the ‘Bookomatic’ – have been installed around Stockholm at Liljeholmen, T-Centralen and Gullmarsplan stations to test consumer response. ‘Bookomatic’ sounding very Wallace and Gromit, no doubt befitting such a contraption!

Staying in Sweden, Monocle reports that Stockholm’s city library and transport authority are importing whole libraries into metro stations. The first one is in Hogdalen station, and will be open by the end of the year – complete with cafe and shop. And people can pick up books they’ve ordered online, on their way into work. Neat.

Badges/buttons/pins featuring art by select artists and designers, or your own designs on demand

No offence intended, but a gift from Middlesex University is perhaps not going to top most people’s wish list this Christmas. However, the creation of a new range of educational toys for the academic institution is a demonstration of just how far licensing has developed over the last few years (especially for niche products).

The gifts were produced by Great Gizmos who have also developed product for the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum. Intriguingly, the similarities between their client portfolio means you can also get the same electric dragster repackaged for the Science Museum.

We commented on the increasing prevalence of designer restaurants in the cultural sector in our previous post on the transformation of museum spaces. That said, we thought this topic merited a post of its own.

While not entirely new, we think the pop-up art restaurant might just well be one of the next big things to hit our world.

The other week, at the recent Art Fund prize awards held at RIBA, it was interesting to note the continued emphasis placed on the use of space within a museums and galleries. In the minds of the judges, the triumph of The Lightbox, Woking owed much to its ability to redefining spaces.

The brief for the building, created by Marks Barfield Architects (of London Eye fame), was to create a hybrid space that drew in as many non-museum elements as traditional ones.

Ben Hoyle reports in The Times today about the rise of brands creating their own content, as a new way of engaging hard to reach consumers. Like the best viral video productions, productions such as the (believe it or not) critically-acclaimed, Hamlet-inspired stageshow Pot Noodle:The Musical and the film Somers Town are proving to be creative hits in their own right.

The advertising agency Mother, reports Ben, is one company leading the charge. Like many others, they are turning themselves into content creators, going as far as setting up their own content-producing division to create quality entertainment.

Quality is king

Quality productions have the capacity to reach sophisticated and fragmented audiences. One response to The Times article suggests that a savvy audience would quickly become tired of these brand approaches, just as they have to traditional marketing. Perhaps. But what about the alternative perspective? In order to keep the attention and interest of savvy consumers, the production needs to become ever more increasingly well-crafted, more ‘art’ and less ‘brand’. Is it a possibility, therefore, that we may end up with advertising agencies creating stunning theatre and television programmes, whose only relationship to the commissioning brand is in the name, sponsor credit or product placement? Does the logical conclusion therefore take us full circle, back to traditional arts or broadcast sponsorship of quality productions?

Opportunities

There is significant scope for enterprising artists, arts organisations and other cultural content owners to potentially take a key role in driving these developments. As the masters of creating great content, engaging productions, inspirational experiences, and emotional connections, the cultural sector is well placed to respond to a business brief. It’s a very different relationship with business, delivering their requirements rather than asking them for help in delivering existing productions, but it could spark a valuable collaboration on multiple levels.

Of course, culture institutions aren’t simply there to simply always respond to commissions. But as an opportunity to apply lateral thinking and artistic processes around a creative challenge, and as a source of income within a well-balanced set of accounts, it’s certainly worth considering.

Some professionals from the culture sector have decided to focus almost exclusively on delivering new content for business. Many of these claim that their value above and beyond advertising agencies is their training and mastering of artistic processes from previous work, often in the not-for-profit or subsidised sector. Their well-honed culture businesses are agencies in their own right, working on a range of client briefs, and providing services from idea generation and strategic planning through to delivery. Many focus on live events, for example, Nutkhut or aerial artists Scarabeus. Like other content specialists, they may fulfil the whole brief themselves, or work with a number of other agencies to meet client needs. Often, the advertising agency acts as strategic director, orchestrating a wide number of independent content producers on behalf of the client.

Through such developments, culture institutions may be able to rediscover the value of Renaissance-style patronage, albeit for today’s Medicis, Pot Noodle’s Unilever, Eurostar et al. If they can brind about the different mindset and restructuring of resources that this invariably requires, we could be in for very interesting times. For advertising, and for the culture sector.

To celebrate their tenth birthday, our friends and their bright minds over at Shine Communications have just released a great new book, ‘Embrace the Chaos’ with ex-editor of The Face, Richard Benson. In it, they aim to set out some of the trends that will and won’t be influencing us in 2009, providing an insider’s guide to essential buzzwords for today and tomorrow.

Why do we like it so much? Because they’ve managed to cram 100 trends or maybe-trends into bitesize user-friendly chunks and, in doing so, provide a great source of inspiration for generating new opportunities for cultural entrepreneurship. It makes it easy to access thinking from outside the culture sector and in turn find ways to apply it, inside the sector.

We recommend that you order a copy or view it online at Shine’s site, and use it as the basis for a few hours reflecting on your own culture institution. Take it as a starting point for ideas and brainstorming, providing 100 interesting angles on our evolving consumer world. Explore how each of the trends could have an influence on your institution’s business model and strategy, on how you operate day-to-day, or on how you attract consumers. In particular, spend some time focussing on the opportunities and new business streams that each of these trends present.

Lectern fever

As an example, take #36: Lectern Fever. This involves a surge of public interest in simple talks at an art gallery. It could, says Shine, be part of a reaction against social networking and the virtual world.

What do we do with this? Well, some culture professionals reading this could see it as a confirmation that they’re doing the right thing anyway – the ‘build the shop and they’ll come eventually, even if demand is cyclical’ argument. I’d be tempted to read this not as a ‘content’ trend, but as a ‘marketing’ trend. It ties into the wider renunciation of slick and stylish experiences, in an attempt to re-engage with what is ‘real’ and not ‘manufactured’. The issues coming out of this – for me at least – are along the lines of:

• Since I already have these ‘simple gallery/museum talks’ at my disposable…
• …I need to get word out, and increase the marketing of them…
• …and ensure I have the right speakers/topics…
• …without making the communications collateral too slick…
• …or too ‘ironic’ (and thereby damage our reputation)…
• …creating a sense of ‘discovering’ or ‘unearthing’ something very ‘natural’ that others may not know about…
• …targeted at interesting new types of users – perhaps early adopters?…
• …which involves really creative communications devices – flyers just won’t cut it…
• …and providing a great experience on the night…
• …and charge a decent entry price…
• …and perhaps even create a whole new sub-brand aimed at this group…

It may or may not work; it may not be radically different from what I already do. I may be more interested in following up my ideas around ‘middle youth’ or ‘the fifty quid bloke’ anyway. Either way, I’ve got one more opportunity in my to-do list than I had ten minutes ago.