The proliferation of brands, and of branding, has been a well documented trend over recent decades, entering categories in which it never historically had a presence. Today everyone from cricket commentators to the Catholic Church are fully aware that they are themselves a brand and, furthermore, that this image can be manipulated and repositioned. The same is true of the art industry and, more specifically, of Damien Hirst.
No single artist, so the experts say, has done more to actively cultivate a commercial profile than Damien Hirst. Since the British artist burst on to the scene in the late 1980s and 1990s, in a wave of multicoloured dots and formaldehyde beasts, he has carefully and deliberately built a strong self brand. With the help and financial backing of Charles Saatchi (a man who knows a thing or two about brands), Hirst cemented his image around challenging, provoking, confronting and modernizing. Moreover, Hirst has been brilliantly successful in milking his brand for money; only last year, aware of his appeal, he took the unprecedented step of bypassing galleries and auctioning his work straight to the public, picking up a cool £111 million in return.
This week, however, Hirst broke the golden rule of branding: never undermine your core proposition.
On Wednesday his newest exhibition - a series of 25 painted canvases – opened to the public. The critics hate it. Why? The marketer in me would suggest this: Hirst’s latest work directly contradicts everything he has come to stand for in the last 20 years. Gone are the animal carcasses with which Hirst questioned the traditional boundaries of art’s form, replaced by the age-old tools of brush and canvas. No longer has he chosen one of London’s ultramodern spaces for his work to hang, but the Wallace collection, surrounded by Old Masters in rooms lined with aristocratic French velvet. Perhaps most shocking of all, these paintings seem not to challenge convention, what the Hirst brand is all about, but imitate it - many have declared his morbid dark paintings simply shoddy Francis Bacon ‘me-toos’.
In simple marketing terms, a brand which is synonymous with challenging the old has now decided to embrace tradition. It has fundamentally contradicted itself. The result, predictably, has been resoundingly negative. In a market where the thoughts of critics are currency, Hirst’s shares have plummeted. The moral of this story, as Hirst is rapidly finding out, is that those determined to live by the brand must also accept they may die by the brand.
