How could artists nowadays create a reputation and a career that allowed them to sell their work and to live off of something they are passionate about? Persistence and courage would be key attitudes to carry out an aesthetic idea that awarded them their own identity, however it is sure that this idea would fall into artistic ostracism were it not a correct strategy of marketing and publicity. Generally, artists have a common way to do which is not artistic in itself: to find a public way of dissemination through exhibitions, performances, magazines and competitions that allow them to create their own reputation.
Picasso, for instance, was not famous when he was born. As well as the rest of artists, he had the same interest in spreading his work and acquiring a reputation inside his contemporary artistic environment. Certainly, at the dawn of the twentieth century media and technology were different from the current ones, however Picasso exerted himself to create an aesthetic recognition by means of specific strategies of marketing and publicity: the organized spreading of his work and exhibitions through photographs and critical comments which gave him artistic notoriety.
Dadaist Tristan Tzara was a clear example of publicity and marketing in arts, too. In fact, it is noticeable that an artistic movement as Dadaism, which had an aesthetic style that was little inconsistent beyond its provocative intention, became one of the most influencing aesthetics in the twentieth century. Since Dadaists were radical and controversial, they were ignored by museums, galleries, magazines, competitions and other traditional means of artistic dissemination. Nevertheless, they were able to produce an alternative spreading “platform” through exhibitions, performances and limited edited magazines which allowed them to give more visibility to their work and to produce their own reputation in the Contemporary Art History.
Art History is plenty of examples of these movements that lead us to demystify the role of intermediaries in the construction of an artistic reputation. Dadaism shows, as well as Impressionism at the end of the nineteenth century, that artistic reputation is consolidated because the artist and its potential customer are put in touch directly thanks to accurate publicity and marketing strategies. A spreading media “platform” that awards the artist-consumer binomial the power to decide what an artistic idea is nowadays.
This is Talents United: a publicity and marketing platform where artists create their own reputation in a constant dialogue with their possible art customers and consumers. A reputation that follows neither a priories nor excellent formulas, but dynamic contexts of creativity. In Talents United artists produce their own artistic identity by facing the challenges that are presented to them. These challenges must be understood as decision points of subjectivity offered by the cultural context in which any creator could prove their own aesthetic idea. An idea that evolves together with their own reputation as artists, which is adapted depending on an unforeseen context.
—Wenceslao García, PhD Art: Production and Research; researcher and professor at Florida Universitaria and associate professor at Universidad Politécnica de Valencia.