Collaboration between modern art and products “Between the Art Gallery and Department Store”
Modern artists collapse the wall between artworks and products, and communicate with the public
The Artists’ Production Exhibition held in the Nam Seoul Annex Building of Seoul Museum of Art (Director Yoo Hee-Young) from June 4 through August 22, 2010 is an introduction to the converging trend of artworks and products, commercial advertisements, and designs that function as a brand. The exhibition displays products created by modern art and product brands, and artists’ works that have been incorporated with the concept of products.
The attempt to mix fine art with popular culture and industry by an art museum, however, is not new. The collaboration between artists and brands, an increasingly popular trend today, is becoming a way to promote artists’ works to the public, and for brands, the collaboration enables them to create a higher value. In other words, such collaboration between modern art and products has become an important axis that forms the world of the artists’ works.
Artists of the 21st Century leap beyond the 20th Century-style production of pop art, which considered the artists’ work room as a “factory”, as so named by Andy Warhol, that manufactured products that would satisfy the desire of consumers in a mass consuming society. Their work is based on a concept of “production” which brings to mind a type of small-and-medium size enterprise. They are created in a systematic way through phases such as creation, production, marketing and promotion, to step closer to the public through large-scale collaboration. In addition, well-known artists often operate online and offline stores to sell art products and items that they create. Downtown department stores design their outer walls with artist’s projects or display their products along with art pieces to cross a boundary between their products and sophisticated art.
Yet, together with the assessment that this is a strategy to find a point of interaction with the public or that it is a new form of pop art, criticism that modern art has been degraded to a peripheral part of a product, and controversy over mass production and the uniqueness of art works continue. Twelve teams of artists and designers take part in this exhibition in a bid to study the diverse thoughts and artistic attitudes toward this phenomenon. They deliver a message to society by becoming an artistic brand and exhibiting a popularized piece of work or as a form of vandalism, using products, stickers, logos and graffiti to convey their determination on their ideas and ‘change’.
Through these works, which are journeys to discover new artistic values with a pop art or activism attitude, we hope to examine how modern art is being applied in different fields, and the appeal of modern art as a product. The exhibition will identify new ways to approach the general public and expand the scope of artist’s work through the work of modern artists that break down walls dividing artistic works and products, and communicate with the public.
