Jun 5, 2009
Good art and good marketing need each other and sometimes are each other.
Art and marketing’s codependency:
People who think art is sacred and marketing is dirty tend to be terrible marketers and marginal artists.
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I think you better start looking at what actually sells before you go there. Great art can be used for good marketing, but hot girls in tight clothes sell everything in the English-speaking world. They are the big number one with a bullet marketing ploy.
I think marketing as a principle is probably not dirty — seeking to make an appeal wpeople will listen to and consider in order to make a buying decision is not inherently dirty. But what the principle is and what happens in practice are two different things.
Well said, friend.
By the way, love the redesign. Especially the tag line. Divine.
I agree totally Frank. Marketing isn’t in and of itself dirty, it’s the marketing practices of our day that are dirty.
If you ask me, that’s because they break the second commandment against worshiping an image of an earthly thing. I think lingering over that pic of the hot girl in tight clothes constitutes “bowing down and worshiping”, but I’m probably a heretic. :-)
/agreed.
I have always believed art is man’s attempt at immitating His creator and is a small reflection of the state of one’s soul. That is why postmodern art bothers me so much – it is chaos without form or substance. Would marketing then be selling one’s soul? Aesthetic philosophy from an accountant is not worth much however…my talents lie elsewhere.
And forgive me for capitalizing His…pure habit.
Zang
I think hearing you repeat “let yourself be known, it SERVES your readers” over and over has been a great benefit to me as an artist wary of marketing.
Thanks.
Ben –
It’s misplaced affections. I think you’re 100% right. We can start our own cult of anti-idolatry.
I get the point as a necessary corrective to the so-called integrity of the starving artist.
And I grant that marketing and art may be at times “codependent.” But teleologically they are two very different things. Two ways of seeing. Two ways of being.
To extend the metaphor, a good artist dealing with marketers should never forget that codependency is a also diagnosed mental health issue.
And what good would an artist be without a mental health issue or two?
:-) Nice. Touche.
“People who think art is sacred and marketing is dirty…”
Begin with the premise that everything of God’s creation is sacred. If we are to be holy as our Maker and Redeemer is holy, to present ourselves bodily as living sacrifices, then all we do in thought, word and deed is sacred.
The quality of our endeavors, whether as artists or marketers, is God’s judgment call, but our intent to excel for God’s glory in Christ is both manditorily incumbent upon us, and the inevitable outworking of the new nature He has worked into us.