L’alliance entre les artistes et les marques : Intérêts croisés et limites des démarches design

Abstract

Collaborations between artists and brands have become common place. We investigate their cooperation through two emblematic cases. First, the Masters Collection project, a collaboration between Louis Vuitton, Jeff Koons, and the Louvre, and second, the Air Force 1 project, a collaboration between Louis Vuitton, Virgil Abloh, and Nike. To analyze the shared interests and inherent limits of these projects, we analyzed online data collected between May and August 2022. After presenting the historical context of the alliance between art and brand design, we indicate the field of tensions between artistic practices and contemporary industrial issues. Based on this analysis, we highlight the trivialization of the convergence between art and marketing-communication practices via our research questions: What are the links between artists’ and brands’ strategies? What are the characteristics and socio-economic logics of their collaboration? What value is created (or not) by their collaboration and for whom? We analyze the role of the artist who, through a work that ressembles design practices, operates a punctual mediation between the symbolic universes of the different stakeholders. This dialogue integrates not only aesthetic characteristics, but also project constraints (temporal, budgetary, and material constraints). We indicate, that by collaborating with brands, the artist takes on the function of a designer. A detailed analysis of these collaborations allows us to identify five key trends: 1. A diversification of collaboration strategies between artistic and branding practices. 2. A difficulty of dissociating their positioning. 3. An increase in the frequency of collaboration. 4. Experimentations with more extravagant collaborations. 5. An orientation towards political collaborations.