OPINION
A DIFFERENT ANGLE ON CREATIVITY
Mark Tungate is a British journalist based in Paris . He is editorial director of the Epica Awards , the only global creative awards judged by the specialist press . Mark is the author of six books about branding and marketing , including the recent Branded Beauty : How Marketing Changed the Way We Look .
THE WORK
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WHEN ART LEAVES THE FRAME
Art museums and exhibition sponsors are exploiting digital and social media in subtle new ways .
They call me the anti-Christ of the art world ,” Bas Korsten , executive creative director of J . Walter Thompson Amsterdam , told me . Surprisingly , he did not look depressed by this description . Perhaps that ’ s because he was sitting on the JWT boat in Cannes and had a line of Gold Lions on the shelf behind him .
What had Bas done to merit such a dramatic response ? If you followed the news from Cannes , you already know . To cut a long story short , Bas and his team created a “ new ” Rembrandt painting using artificial intelligence and a 3D printer . Once the machine had been fed with everything it needed to know about the artist ’ s painting style — not to mention 17th century clothing — it got to work , eventually producing an eerily plausible Rembrandt portrait .
“ What ’ s the point ?” you may ask . In fact , the client was the Dutch bank ING , which wanted to draw attention to the fact that it is a longstanding supporter of the art world . These days , however , sticking your name on an exhibition poster is not enough . Sponsors , and indeed museums , need to create buzz .
The Next Rembrandt , as the artificial intelligence project was called , certainly achieved that . And although it provoked controversy , it was actually welcomed by some scholars , as it unearthed a few interesting new facts about Rembrandt ’ s work and life . For example , by analyzing the artist ’ s actual canvases , the project team noticed similarities pointing to the fact that he ’ d bought them all from the same supplier .
I first noticed a thawing in the relationship between the digital and art worlds in May 2015 , when the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York reopened in a new building . Apart from the stylishness of the museum itself — which was designed by Renzo Piano — I noticed all the millennial visitors snapping artworks with their phones .
In Paris , where I live , you barely have time to think about removing your phone from your pocket at an art museum before a security guard hustles up and tells you to put it away . When I asked a guide at the Whitney if I could take pictures , she said : “ Sure , just don ’ t use the flash .”
In fact , she told me the museum actively encouraged visitors to post pictures on Instagram . I later read that # NewWhitney had generated more than 6,000 Instagram images in the first week of opening , and that it was positioning itself as one of the world ’ s most social museums . A new trend began to come into frame , if you ’ ll excuse the pun , when I learned of an innovation at Rubens ’ House in Antwerp . The museum was using iBeacon transmitters — wall-mounted devices resembling grey plastic pebbles — to send additional information about the artworks and objects on display to visitors ’ smartphones , via an app . This provided a deeper and richer visit , dispensing with
July - August 2016 | adobo magazine