The Intersection of the Contemporary Art Market and Brands

Artistic collaborations have become increasingly common for brands. The luxury industry instrumentalizes art to overcome challenges of growth and legitimization. Through artistic collaboration, luxury brands endow their goods with symbolic and emotional qualities and aim to decorrelate the price from the function of their goods. While artistic collaboration has been researched from the brand perspective, especially regarding the benefits for luxury brands, the role of the artist is under researched. Literature that discusses the artist as a brand seldomly draws the connection to brand collaboration. Therefore, this thesis considers brand collaboration from the artist’s perspective and examines which contemporary artists’ characteristics may predict brand collaboration. It investigates the impact of the artist’s brand on collaboration and empirically shows that luxury brands dominate artistic collaborations within the contemporary art market. Artists’ characteristics and measurements for the artist brand are examined for a sample of 413 top contemporary artists according to auction turnover from 2000 to 2020. Logistic regression analysis shows that artists from the United States have a higher likelihood of brand collaboration than artists from other nationalities. The age of the artist and the medium painting are predictors for brand collaboration and popularity, talent, and fame variables regarding the artist’s brand have a partial impact on brand collaboration. Whereas a higher popularity measure predicts brand collaboration, the findings suggest that the artist’s talent may not be significant. The fame of an artist impacts brand collaboration; death has a negative impact; however, the number of international exhibitions does not significantly predict brand collaboration. The main contribution of the thesis is the consideration of artists’ characteristics and the empirical analysis of their predictive power. The thesis argues that art market disparities are partly mirrored in brand collaboration. However, the results also imply potential opportunities for brand collaboration with younger and emerging artists which can counter the presented disbalances.