Is Luxury Fashion Supporting the Arts or Subsuming Them?

I REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I saw an ad on a banana; it was for Frozen 2, and it felt like the beginning of something, of everything becoming an ad. I think I ate that banana in 2019, and look how far we’ve come: This year’s blockbuster, the Lego movie, itself basically an ad for Lego, is also a biopic of Pharrell Williams, the rapper who is also the creative director for Louis Vuitton. Where does the culture end and the ad begin? They don’t want you to know.

When a Frozen or Pharrell-type phenom emerges, brands will work to find a way to capitalize on the attention they attract. In the art world, the crossovers are mostly happening between artists and luxury fashion, since both realms attract wealthy clientele. When these fashion collaborations began taking over the art world, around the time of the banana ad, I was optimistic: fashion money sure beats the nefarious sources of wealth routed through art’s opaque market. And together, artists and brands were making cool stuff, like that Anna Uddenberg sculpture for Balenciaga, and the photos Tyler Mitchell took for Ferragamo in the Uffizi.

But then, it started to feel as if art and marketing were beginning to collapse into one thing. I felt this acutely over the summer, when Carrie Mae Weems launched a Bottega Veneta campaign. In one of the black-and-white photographs, A$AP Rocky sits at a kitchen table facing a mirror; the artist stands behind him, her hands on his shoulders. The picture, overlaid with the Bottega logo, debuted on Father’s Day, and is a rejoinder to, or remake of, Weems’s iconic 1990 “Kitchen Table” series.

That series had a kitchen table, but also a message—one that feels hard to square with ideas of luxury and Father’s Day. Over the course of 20 images, accompanied by words, we see a Black woman (Weems herself) become a mother, and then watch as that mother learns to be alone. The father of her child is out of the picture, and there she sits, at her far-from-luxurious kitchen table, in a sparse room painted white. She is poised, resilient. In that ordinary room, Weems built a rich world. Over the course of the series, others join her at the table, enacting everday conversations and domestic dramas. It’s always the same shot—dangling overhead light, door to the right—but the people in the pictures change, as do the pictures on the wall behind them (one shows Malcolm X). Her evolving world-within-a-kitchen is a nod to the unsung worlds countless women have nurtured in countless kitchens.

Seeing an artwork as powerful as this one become an ad felt wrong. There’s plenty of art that can easily be repackaged into mere style, with little trade-off. But this collaboration was harder to square with the original—which is not, I don’t think, a dig at Weems for participating in something that so many other artists have participated in too. It’s the opposite: a compliment to the power of the original series, which is decidedly art, not just an aesthetic, or a personal brand.

“SELLING OUT” IS WHAT WE ONCE CALLED THIS, back when it was mostly white men with generational wealth who got to label things, back when it seemed possible to be a creative who didn’t have to compromise to eat. But as Jay Caspian Kang put it in the New Yorker last year, “The people who came of age during or after the 2008 financial crisis … do not have much patience for Gen Xers who wax nostalgic about bands that ignored major-record-label attention or Adbusters or whatever else.”

For weeks, “what do you think of the Carrie Mae Weems Bottega ad?” was the question I posed at any dinner table where I happened to sit. Predictable defenses concerned not the image itself, but the idea that it was good for the artist to have gotten paid, and good for brands to support the arts. Others added that an artist might as well say yes: brands will steal your ideas anyway, so you might as well get something out of it.

Fair enough: for its 2004–08 iPod campaign, Apple cribbed Robert Longo’s iconic 1980s series of silhouetted figures flinging their bodies around in movements that can only be described as “dancing.” Longo was irritated, he later said in an interview with W magazine, but in 2010 he was approached by Bottega Veneta too; he told W that they effectively said, “instead of ripping you off, we want to hire you.” And he jumped at the chance, making new pictures of businesspeople apparently in ecstasy—this time wearing Bottega.

A more 2020s-flavor rip-off occurs in Charli XCX’s video for “360,” which is itself also an ad for Google products. One scene is a dead ringer for a Deana Lawson photograph. In a drab living room with mismatched furniture and shoddy lighting fixtures (yet subjects well-lit), a group of people face the camera, their bodies set in attitudes somewhere between candid lounging and dramatic posing. Bellies poke out between glamorous garments. Stilettos are lodged in thick carpet. The incongruity makes the scene at once more real and more staged, Lawson’s signature move.

THROUGHOUT THE 20TH CENTURY, photographers strove mightily to gain respect as artists—to conceive of the camera as not just a commercial or mechanical tool, but as an artistic one. Alfred Stieglitz, with his illustrative work as with his gallery, 291, as well as with his journal, Camera Notes, galvanized a generation in the 1910s to think of photography as being every bit as pictorial and expressive as painting and sculpture. In the 1970s, William Eggleston did the same for color photography, insisting the medium’s allure wasn’t only for ads, but for artworks as well.

It worked: Art photography is distinct enough from advertising now that photographers are playing around with muddling the two. Tyler Mitchell, Juergen Teller, and Roe Ethridge have had success
ping-ponging between galleries and glossies. For Mitchell, this is about celebrating Black joy and excellence in all its forms, from the glamorous to the everyday. Meanwhile Ethridge, exhibiting everywhere in the 2010s, saw his early work framed as ironic commentary on advertisements and editorial clichés. But quickly, his artistic and advertising work became hard to distinguish: Chanel Bracelets with Mackerel (2013), an edition of 5, shows fish trapped in luxury bangles. It’s in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art … and an outtake from an ad campaign that he shot.

Complain, if you like, that melding luxury ads and contemporary art is selling out. Jay Caspian Kang is right, in his New Yorker essay, to bemoan the fact that “we’ve largely abandoned the part of the ‘sellout’ critique that assumes nothing truly interesting or revolutionary can ever be found on mass-market platforms.” And yet, it’s hard to feel as if today’s art world is very “revolutionary” compared to mass markets. These days, protecting art for art’s sake might just make you an elitist gatekeeper.

Meaning one can argue, paradoxically, that there is in fact a class politics involved in addressing an audience beyond galleries and museums, for even if your audience can’t afford luxury, they probably enjoy fantasizing about it, and are more likely to see an ad on a yellow cab or in a magazine than in a museum. They won’t have had to pay admission, and, as a bonus, they won’t feel like they don’t get it if they don’t have an art history degree (never mind that there might not be much to get). What’s more, ads may actually have the power to influence the cultural imaginary, to change the things we desire: representation, it’s all the rage.

THE MUSIC INDUSTRY, LESS PRONE TO ELITISM than art, dealt with this question of ads in the aughts. Collaboration proponents argued that musicians would do well to adapt to a changing mediascape if they wanted to survive financially, as Tina Turner and David Bowie did in a 1987 Pepsi ad, and that they might even be able to infiltrate the mainstream with radical ideas. Twenty years on, few musicians make money from actual music anymore. It’s all tours, ads, and sneaker collabs. Could visual artists be next?

This past January, Cindy Sherman, who resisted commercial work for so long, released a Marc Jacobs campaign. Like Weems, she adapted her signature move—dressing up as other people for the camera—in pictures shot by Teller. Sherman’s breakthrough work of the late 1970s was formative to the Pictures Generation, a group of artists responding to how utopian countercultures had by then become commercialized, making pictures that betrayed a media landscape where everyone was both critic and consumer. Making an ad then, in some ways proves Sherman’s own point about pictures. Unlike with Weems, there’s no sincere message being supplanted with a product. Instead, Marc Jacobs is just another costume Sherman dons.

Nan Goldin’s Gucci campaign this past fall saw Blondie singer Debbie Harry in the back of a vintage car with a small dog and a fancy bag. Like Goldin’s iconic work of the 1980s, this is a portrait of an artsy New Yorker all made up for a night out downtown. But remove the intimacy, the spontaneity, the lo-fi camera, the resourcefulness, and the grit from a Nan Goldin photograph, and what do you have left? Just a regular picture. Harry is impeccably lit and the shot feels impersonal, like a still from a Hollywood remake of that stunning 2022 documentary about Goldin’s life, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. The campaign proves that Goldin’s signature is, in fact, inimitable, even by her.

We should be asking, is fashion supporting the arts or is it subsuming them? A museum director recently mentioned to me that younger patrons are proving harder to attract because they are investing in their closets instead. Besides, these days they can get their art fix—painting, sculpture, installation—from runway shows.

Then again, there are brands, like Dior and Chanel, that seem to get why total collapse won’t do, and so are sponsoring museum exhibitions and buying ads in art magazines as well as tapping artists for collaborations. They’re supporting those ecosystems that make art art, rather than gobbling it all up for themselves, and turning it into something else. Because without those ecosystems and their dialogues, not only will the art simply be less good … there will be fewer opportunities to show off your fancy outfits at galas!

What’s truly worth defending against the collapsing worlds of art and luxury isn’t exclusivity or art world insider baseball. It’s that sphere set apart for experimentation and risk, for weirdness and uselessness, for art that can challenge, delight, and surprise.