The art of flogging cars

Here was an extraordinary example of how big business impinges on the world of culture. It represented Volkswagen’s attempt, during Project Fox at least, to become not a culturally savvy advertiser, nor even a patron of culture, but a culture unto itself.

There has been a steady convergence between the worlds of art and commerce for decades, but in the past few years the trend has intensified. Faced with knowing audiences inured to the banalities of traditional advertising, corporations and brands are cashing in on the cachet of art. Companies such as Unilever and BP are not only sponsoring cultural events but also increasingly demanding “deep ownership” of everything they touch. The days of handing over a cheque and slapping a logo on an exhibition are finished.

Corporations are seeking to embody the values they were once content to borrow from others. In Volkswagen’s case the company wanted to be even trendier than the young, urban consumers at whom they were aiming the Fox. Fashion houses often led the way. For them, after all, conspicuous consumption and spectacular display are merely a polite mirroring of the behaviour of their clients. Cartier launched its Art Foundation in 1984, Prada in 1993.

Banks have also played a key role. Deutsche Bank set the seal on its reputation as the world’s greatest corporate art collector with the launch of its joint project with the Guggenheim, the Deutsche Guggenheim museum in Berlin, in 1993. In 2002 Bloomberg, one of the leading art sponsors in the UK, set up an art space in its City of London headquarters. Its remit was not to show off Bloomberg’s art collection but to operate as a public gallery, bringing in shows of new art just as the Serpentine Gallery or Camden Arts Centre might do.

Now the trend is percolating downwards through the hierarchy of brands to those that “face” the mass-market, for example Red Bull, which has its own art prize for works made from empty Red Bull cans — and even estate agents. In 2001 the Foxtons chain in the South East began to brand its fleet of Minis each year to capture a particular cultural moment.

Last year’s “Sixties Summer of Love” effort featured the word “Love” painted in psychedelic lettering on the roof. It has been replaced by an “Urban Camouflage” design concept, which surely signals the end of camouflage as a fashionable motif.

So what, you may say. All this hostility to corporations may seem not only sniffy but also ungrateful. Artists, creatives and art institutions have rarely been in a position to refuse hard cash. As the American critic Clement Greenberg put it: “Artists are tied to the rich by an umbilical cord of gold.”

Colin Tweedy, chief executive of Arts & Business, a network that brings arts organisations and businesses together, says: “Money and art have always gone together, from the Florentine Medicis to the Hungarian Esterhazy to the Armenian Gulbenkian. Now we have a new form of patron, the corporation.” Indeed corporations have stepped into a void left by the decline of private and state patronage.

But not all patrons are the same. There is a cultural crudity about corporations because their bottom line is always money. Kings, aristocrats, oligarchs, plutocrats, popes, bishops, dictators and even democratic states tend, at least, to possess more personal, complicated reasons to align themselves with art and artists.

In Copenhagen, at the VW launch, the point was demonstrated at a PowerPoint presentation by Volkswagen’s head of product development. It was that the Fox was “the maximum vehicle for the minimum money”. Beamed on to the screen behind him was an image of the vehicle responsible for the surrounding farrago — a small car like any other, that looked about as uncreative as you can get.

So what is being sold here — art or a motor vehicle? Chin-tao Wu, author of Privatising Culture, says: “Such activities create confusion between what is essentially culture and what is a commercial marketing strategy and the line is becoming more blurred.”

The critic Julian Stallabrass cites the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, who makes work for Louis Vuitton: “There’s a piece of animation by him in which one of his monsters travels into a fantasy world of LV logos. It’s halfway between an ad and work and yet it was an opening exhibit in an exhibition staged in Venice in 2003 celebrating 40 years of painting at the biennale.

“As corporations move in this direction they undermine what we are supposed to value in art — creativity and idealism free from instrumental demands. The power of art in the past was that it held out the prospect of genuinely free and unalienated labour for the artist and the people who enjoy the art.” The tension here is an old one — between commerce on one hand, and art on the other. In his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, responding to a different threat, from a different age, to the idea of culture, T. S. Eliot wrote: “The fact that culture has become, in some sense, a department of politics, should not obscure in our memory the fact that at other periods politics has been actively pursued within a culture.”

You could substitute “commerce” for “politics” and the point would still stand. But there is, perhaps, little point shouting into the void. The corporate appropriation of art appears unstoppable. In years to come, culture will more and more come to act as the perfect cipher for corporations’ identities and brands.

As Volkswagen proudly boasted at the launch of its little car: “Fox promotes young talent, creates room and makes space for new ideas. It’s what’s inside that really counts. It’s all about new contents. For the hotel. For catering. For urban mobility.”

You can see the result at a car showroom — rather than gallery — next year.