Hard-Branding the Art Museum – from Prado to Prada (original) (raw)
Related papers
Branding in the New Museum Era
Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics, 2016
Undoubtedly, museums play a vital role in the economy and tourism constituting a significant unit of cultural tourism. However, facing either rival competition within the leisure industry or funding cutbacks museums are now adopting for-profit strategies aligned with marketing principles. Today museums have redefined their role and activities to conclude newer and more active experiences and entertainment, shifting to experiential notions of "edutainment" and "artertainment".This paper extends the current knowledge by drawing on a review of 40 papers this study presents the fundamental components of brand concept within the museum industry. Precisely, essential elements of branding such as brand equity, brand loyalty and brand resonance are discussed and set to museum sector. This study makes an important contribution to the field of tourist and cultural marketing by advancing our understanding of museum branding and by proposing both new research topics and valuable managerial implications to museums practitioners and scholars.
2019
As modern practice shows, museums can form not only national but also urban identities, with equal success and thus become a framework for a complex system of local images and narratives. The brand as an identity today is formed not only at the level of public statements, made by administration representatives, alongside with the use of the official identity (logo, colours), but also in everyday space, which implies the need for the museum to enter the city space and for its museumification. In this article, the author would like to highlight, once more, the role of the museum in the formation of a sustainable brand of the territory, to show examples from Eastern Europe and, finally, to analyse the experience of museums working alongside the urban space to produce and maintain a certain brand. In addition to the analysis of direct tools, the author seeks to highlight a series of problematic issues that arise from working with the formation of a brand in Russian cities. In the article, the author addresses the often ignored basic principles and strategies for the integration of museums into the urban space.
CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL HERITAGE – AN ASSET FOR CITY BRANDING
Spatium, 2013
Achieving wider recognition is part of the development agenda of contemporary cities, which are all confronted with the need to stand out and compete against one another. City branding reads as and plays an important role in this struggle for recognition. The identity of a city is generated over a long period, as it undergoes historical change, resulting in cultural diversity as the product of a specific environment.
VISUAL IDENTITY AND TOWN BRANDING
We are living in a world in which the historic cores of tourist cities have turned into empty shells, although well preserved and restored as symbols – elegant shells emptied of their original contents of living. But the ideologues of the tourism market and unlimited real-estate transactions seem to deliberately overlook the fact that, without the people who actually live, work, suffer, and rejoice there, these colorful remnants of the past will remain mere symbols in a dead landscape. Creating artistic communities in abandoned industrial buildings and post-industrial zones in city centers, if not carefully planned and conducted on the basis of socio-spatial studies, can produce an extremely conflict-laden social mixture, with a rift between wealthy individuals, who live in the restored city centers, and low-income citizens living in the dilapidated inner city areas (Council of Europe, 1997). The central feature of cultural planning and the self-creation of communities is an extremely broad anthropological definition of “culture” as a “way of living”. Building the so-called iconic architecture according to the cultural policy of a community or nation can become a trigger for revitalizing an urban neighborhood or for city branding. Conceiving a museum may, by the very choice of the location or the facility to be converted into a museum, become a trigger for restructuring or developing a part of the city, or function as a statement of national cultural policy. Shaping the architectural form means shaping messages, and can therefore serve as a tool of marketing or ideological strategies. Museums are the Cathedrals of Urban Modernity (Lorente 2011:11), which means that, similar to the cathedral, the museum has since the Enlightenment period evolved into an urban phenomenon. Like the cathedral, the museum is a marker of (Western) metropolises, an index of urban environment and a place where new directives and ideologies emerge, modeling people’s worldviews and thus entering the imaginary transnational communities (Adams 2003:135). Museums of Fine Arts are the fixers of a regulated city or state, as well as their “Identity-defining” machines (Maleuvre 1999:107, quoting Carol Duncan). (According to Carol Duncan in her book Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, art museums are places of civilizational rituals, but also cultural artifacts that are much more than neutral shelters of art. Museums as places of ritual therefore involve the audience in the performance or scenario of a ritual that communicates and affirms certain ideas, values, and social identities: accordingly, museums are places where political power, social interests, and the history of cultural forms distinctively intersect.) Art museums provide the setting for certain civic rituals (“liminality” is a term associated with ritual), and their ideological function may 307 be to link politics and culture. The civil role of the museum is to symbolize local, regional, or national pride, which necessarily leads to the conclusion that many museums are investing in architecture at the expense of their collections, or art in the museum (Carbone 2004:27). Architecture of the Louvre Museum is an expression of the continuity of Western civilization – inside it, names and portraits of great artists are inscribed into the architectural details, rendering the perfect individual examples from its history. In today’s globalised civilization, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa (SANAA, Japan, 1999-2004) has a circular ground plan, meant to put an end to the traditional hierarchy of facades and entrances. Four entrances, one in each segment of the circle, introduce the plurality of access and directions comparable to the four equal facades with porches in Palladio’s Mannerist Villa Rotonda. The museum contains several individual volumes – squares and circles of various sizes and varied heights. As the museum is situated in a valley, the glass ceilings of its pavilions make it possible to look at the exhibition from the hill above the museum, from the garden of a castle that formerly belonged to the local lords, which has been declared a national site of extraordinary scenic beauty as one can also enjoy the view of cherry trees in blossom there; thus, natural garden and artifacts have been juxtaposed and equally exposed to the public. The concept of musealization (the collection, archivation, and production) of art, especially of contemporary art (the Museum of Contemporary Art as an architectural program was established in ca. 1800) has been continually questioned. Contemporary art should, therefore, become a part of everyday life, itself emerging from it. Art in public space has greater social visibility as it addresses non-gallery or wider audiences, often using informational and signalization infrastructure of the city (LED screens, billboards...). In most European countries, there is a law that public sculpture should be integrated in a building or an urban project, or that 1% of the budget intended for public buildings should be spent on integrating art into the project. In my text, I will present some examples of the above mentioned, as well as for branding the city through the construction of iconic architecture, the museum in particular, be it in new or in converted facilities.
S I S e p t e m b e r 2 8-3 0 , 2 0 1 6 I B u c h a r e s t-R o m a n i a Abstract In a Global World is the urban identity a future challenge for us the Architects? From decades already, the literature on place making in various fields of creativity is set on this demanding and, yet most challenging task, new ways of thinking urban identity and intelligent ways to brand it and sell it to attract capital and interest upon their location. The aim of present paper is to review these new methods of approaching urban identity. In academic theories you can distinguish two areas: the hardware design of shaping the urban space in terms of creating distinctive urban forms and the software design of o more subtle area of mutual influence between artistic elites, civic voices and empowerment structures in a collective effort to exist and make a point on the map of capital flowing. Paul Knox in his book Cities and Design sees design as an important link between urban image and capital accumulation at the expense of human need. Another perspective is added by Hal Foster that criticised in his book The Art-Architecture Complex the connection between art-architecture as being a generator of urban identity and place branding. Finally, Guy Julier in his article Urban Designscapes and the Production of Aesthetic Consent studies the urban identity in different stances. Guy Julier introduces this concept of urban designscape, a term to express the network of activities and artefacts that produce place-identity within city. The present research considers a more extended version of the role of design in this process. It is a critical approach to three designscapes: Barcelona, Copenhagen and Valencia, which I personally felt and experimented during study trips with our students. In doing so, it evaluates contrasting contemporary approaches in building urban identity: fashion districts, the landmark as architect brand and the unconventionally spaces – places in flow. The notion of hard and soft branding allow useful tools to critique and understand the cultural role of design in urban regeneration. Is the metamorphosis of the architectural program-the museum-reflects the future challenge in architecture? These new identities embedded within creative industries will have a bigger impact to a wider population through their urban designscapes? In sum, this fusion in-between art and architecture reveals subtle ways of rebranding urban identity in the contemporary city.
From city identity to city branding: artivistic initiatives or top-down urban regeneration?
The Role of Cultural Institutions and Events in the Marketing of Cities and Regions, 2016
From city identity to city branding: artivistic initiatives or top-down urban regeneration? Every society, and even each city individually, has developed throughout history its own system of values, lifestyles and everyday life patterns, with which they gained worldwide recognition-fame. These specific city identities have often been supported by the artistic narratives, hence the majority of people came to know about them indirectly, through literature, theatre film... Paris became (the) "Paris" during the time when few people were able to travel there and personally confirm that all that had been written about Paris was true. The few had the opportunity for the first hand experience brought by the travel journals and chronicles of the privileged-who had described and given scenes from a different type of life of their own. These lifestyles of "world cities" can be the object of respect, desire, curiosity, but also of contempt, ridicule, fear even (the fear of vice, and hustle and bustle of the metropolis). Nevertheless, it is these lifestyles of the locals that give the primary colour, primary tone, to the city and so they give the cause why the cities with similar urban and architectural structures are defined through different identities. Paris as a "moving holiday" in the twenties of the 20 th century (Hemingway), New York and San Francisco in the age of contra-culture, London with its Carnaby street in the 60's, Tokyo or Seoul, the cities we get 'lost in translation' even nowadays, despite all the EXPOs, Olympic games and festivals held there; Italy of the slow food movements, or Serbia and nightlife-all of these are the environments recognisable in their various yet appealing lifestyles, the lifestyles, which attract people all around the world. Thus, it is the issue of branding the city not only with its cultural heritage, but with exactly the lifestyles essential for the development of tourism on the one hand, but for the development of the economy (investments) on the other hand (it is important to develop the identity of the city that is favourable for the lifestyle of economic elite 1). 1 Glasgow the capital of culture in 1990 had specifically this task.
Maximising the role of cultural heritage when branding the city
Cultural Heritage Essentials, 2020
Communication is an integral part of the integrated approach for heritage-led urban development, which is commonly shaped by governance, financing, planning tools and legal frameworks mainly. And the way for that is by connecting heritage to modern city branding and marketing, which is a novelty in projects of this kind.
Museum brands living beyond their walls
Inspired by an internship at the Musée du quai Branly Paris, I explore the concept of a 'museum brand' and how this might be creatively, and openly applied to the case of the 'Louvre Abu Dhabi' in order to generate alternative formats and communication strategies for engaging with the resident U.A.E population.