Can ads be art?

ON A frosty day in Stockholm in October an audience of journalists and art writers assembled to see Rikrit Tiravanija being presented with the Absolut Art Award, worth €15,000. We had been flown in from as far afield as Sydney, Los Angeles, New York and Moscow, and were somewhat bewildered.

This was not solely due to the fact that Absolut had been lavishly poured at the previous evening’s reception, but to the strange disconnect between an award created to promote a brand of spirits, and an artist whose work is about making communal and anti-capitalist gestures.

One such project, The Land, in Thailand, saw Tiravanija create a self-sustaining community dedicated to artist-led discussions about how we might live differently. It doesn’t seem such an easy marriage with a brand recently bought by multi-national giant Pernod Ricard.

We shouldn’t have been surprised because this is just one more play in an increasingly sophisticated game, whereby brands acquire something of the ineffable qualities of art, and artists acquire money, which in turn enables them to make more art.

In this sense brands such as Absolut vodka who have commissioned hundreds of works of art in their name are modern-day Medicis. The Absolut Art Award, now in its second year, has replaced the commissions, and is the next stage in what must be one of the longest-running ad campaigns in the world. Absolut is the patron that enables art, benefiting by association, but also, as was the case with the Renaissance patrons, often directing the content and form of the work.

People worried about this less back in the 15th century. Artists were artisans, and patrons thought nothing of insisting that the faces of family members were included in the work they were paying for: as did Cosimo di Medici, with the procession of the Magi, by Gozzoli in Florence’s Medici Riccardi Chapel. Cosimo also locked up another artist, Filippo Lippi, until his work was finished, as he was sick of Lippi’s drinking and womanising coming between him and his commission. In Rome, Pope Julius II threatened to have Michelangelo thrown off the scaffold in the Sistine Chapel if he didn’t hurry up with it. It’s hard to picture any of today’s patrons, even corporate ones, getting away with such behaviour.

While these Renaissance patrons had a different sense of the artist’s place in society, they had an understanding of the effect of art on its audiences, and the power of visual images to convey a range of messages that still endures today. This sense of art conferring some of its value on its owner is also one of the reasons that corporate art collections were created. Owning art becomes a form of advertising, in that it advertises the self as a creative person.

Advertising itself may seem like a modern phenomenon, but the practice of working with artists to create it goes back to the 19th century. Lever Brothers (now Unilever) were pioneers, working with Pre-Raphaelite painters, such as John Everett Millais and Charles Burton Barber to advertise their soaps. William Hesketh Lever once remarked that 50 per cent of the money he spent on advertising was wasted, it was just that he didn’t know which 50 . . .

At the same time as this, across Europe, other ideas about the role of the artist in society were emerging. The avant-garde were demanding that art promote social reform and destroy accepted ideologies, while the art-for-art’s sake movement was insisting that art had no other role than just to be itself.

Living with these legacies today, it’s no wonder that the assembled group in Stockholm was so conflicted about Tiravanija’s prize. It has been a long time since there was any agreement on what art is actually for.

Artists themselves have historically been far less concerned about their role in society than society itself seems to be. Writers who worked as copy writers have included Fay Weldon ( Go To Work on an Egg), Salman Rushdie ( Irresistibubble,for Aero) and Irish poet, Derek Mahon.

Other famous former copywriters are F Scott Fitzgerald, Terry Gilliam, Alec Guinness, Dashiell Hammett, Elmore Leonard, Alan Parker and Hugh Hefner. Rushdie himself, who also wrote: "Look into the Mirrortomorrow – you'll like what you see" for the Daily Mirror, has said that "advertising taught me discipline . . . and ever since those days I have treated my writing simply as a job to be done, refusing myself all (well, most) luxuries of artistic temperament".

Many artists have ignored the luxuries of temperament throughout the years. In the 1930s, American painter Norman Rockwell created six illustrations for Coca-Cola. At the same time, in the UK, Shell commissioned artists including Paul Nash, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Graham Sutherland and Ben Nicholson to design posters for the sides of their delivery lorries. From 1945, Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí, Henry More, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol made labels for Château Mouton Rothschild, while between 1950 and 1975, the Container Corporation of America (later bought by Jefferson Smurfit) commissioned artists including Fernand Léger, René Magritte and Willem de Kooning to make paintings that were used as print ads in magazines.

Absolut’s involvement with art goes back to the 1980s, when Michel Roux, the US importer of Absolut Vodka met Andy Warhol at a dinner party.

Warhol didn’t drink but told Roux that he loved the shape and “artfulness” of the Absolut bottle, and went on to suggest that he paint it. Roux bought the painting, a black bottle against a yellow background, for $65,000, and used it as the first Absolut Art advert, “Absolut Warhol”.

Warhol, perhaps unsurprisingly on receipt of the money, suggested that he paint all future Absolut adverts, but Roux decided instead to commission a different artist each time.

Warhol suggested Keith Haring, who demanded a higher fee, saying he was a better painter, but Roux decreed that $65,000 become the upper limit, saying that no one was “worth more than Andy”. The Absolut collection today contains some of the world’s most famous artists from all over the world, including Damien Hirst, Louise Bourgeois, Peter Blake, Francesco Clemente, Douglas Gordon, Vik Muniz, Chris Ofili, Maruizio Cattelan and Ed Ruscha.

Irish artist Michael Kane made work for the Absolut Collection, and remembers a suggestion of free vodka being part of the commission. “There was mention of it, but I think it was a myth,” he says. “I approached it like any other commission. They don’t put any stipulations on you, except that you have to include the vodka bottle, so it tied in with the work I was doing. I said yes because I had seen the catalogue of artists in the collection and it was very impressive.”

This artistic freedom is a result of a different set of restrictions. In Sweden, the advertising of alcohol is illegal. In the UK, a change in the law in the 1980s restricting the use of imagery in cigarette advertising (you could no longer show anyone actually smoking) led to now-iconic ads for Benson and Hedges and Silk Cut.

In Sweden, Absolut’s adoption of art in place of direct advertising has led to a stronger brand identity. The Absolut artworks are used as “regular” advertising in the rest of the world.

Art, like advertising, is a business. The gallery system, auction houses, museums and exhibition halls all use art as a form of currency, whether financial or cultural. In many ways, art cannot exist without some form of commerce, but many people – both artists and art lovers – don’t want to admit that. Nevertheless, the fascination endures, and was summed up by Oscar Wilde when he said: “When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss money.”

As Absolut moves away from commissioning artists to create paintings, to awarding money to artists to make work, it’s just another part of the equation in a world where one cannot do without the other.