MEDIA COMMUNICATIONS IN THE PROMOTION OF ART AND ARTISTS

Abstract

For successful work, people need to be able to build communications with their audience in the conditions of constantly changing, highly competitive environment. In today’s world, which has become a global media space, art business and culture are no exception. The art market has a need to create a special information field. Starting from the era of modernism, the information function of the art market has been getting increasingly important. In art, the name expresses the brand, and this tendency can be already found in the promotion of impressionists by the marchands Paul Durand-Ruel, Georges Petit, Ambroise Vollard. Today as well, the demand for the artist largely depends on the information support of their life and work. The article analyzes the growing role of media in the promotion of artists, with an emphasis on the cultural analysis within the evolution of various artistic and aesthetic concepts from the late 19th to the early 21st century, as well as the issues related to the understanding of new media, and their role in the art process. In the Russian applied cultural studies, this seems to be a promising direction, which has not yet been properly developed. The author comes to the conclusion that media communications play an important role in promoting artistic trends and artists, no matter what aesthetic direction we are talking about. The artist’s appearance on the covers of reputable publications, their citations in the media, interviews with them are a part of this artist’s career, along with their exhibition portfolio, representation in collections and auction statistics. In some cases, media are also a way to legitimize art directions. At the turn of the 20th — 21st centuries, with the development of multimedia technologies and the Internet, it is possible to say that the system of art market with a vertical hierarchy, developed in the twentieth century, has shifted to horizontal connections and convergence between various participants of artistic communications. At the same time, the use of media technologies in the modern art process has no connection with the quality of artistic product, but is equally important for everyone.