{"id":239675,"date":"2025-11-02T13:51:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-02T13:51:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/239675\/"},"modified":"2025-11-02T13:51:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-02T13:51:13","slug":"comment-what-the-art-market-doesnt-allow-branded-content-does-for-tom-sachs-the-art-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/239675\/","title":{"rendered":"Comment | What the art market doesn\u2019t allow, branded content does for Tom Sachs – The Art Newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

The rules of artist representation are up for grabs in today\u2019s nervously experimental market. In August, a month that brought us the merry-go-round mini-drama of Jeff Koons\u2019s return to Gagosian<\/a> from Pace Gallery, having left Gagosian for them in 2021, came too a surprising email announcement from a US public relations firm, titled \u201cTom Sachs: Now Represented by The Lede Company\u201d.<\/p>\n

The body of the email clarifies that this is an \u201cagency representation\u201d and its small print notes that Thaddaeus Ropac \u201cwill continue to represent Tom Sachs for all gallery and fine art inquiries\u201d, a relationship that has been in place since 1998. <\/p>\n

The Lede Company may have overblown a fairly standard\u2014and, thanks to Sachs ending his contract and moving to a different agency, short-lived\u2014PR role, but the brief additional representation still begs the question: where does a gallery end and an agency begin?<\/p>\n

In Sachs\u2019s case, promoting clothing deals falls into the latter camp. These include a collaboration with Levi\u2019s jeans and a long-standing arrangement with Nike, for whom his studio has recently created an app with weekly fitness and lifestyle challenges (\u201cparticipation will help change your life\u201d), all in aid of promoting its Mars Yard 3.0 trainers, which were released in September (retail price tag $275).<\/p>\n

Sachs\u2019s practice has long explored paradoxes of consumerism, though such collaborations seem a far cry from his celebrated works from the turn of this century, which included an Herm\u00e8s hand grenade and a Chanel-branded guillotine. His auction record of $302,400 was for Tiffany Value Meal, a 1998 work that overlaid a McDonald\u2019s meal on a tray with the jeweller\u2019s branding.<\/p>\n

An opportunity for greater relevance<\/p>\n

Both Sachs and his agency representatives lean into the artistic and even conceptual nature of his brand collaborations\u2014art has long elevated fashion more than the reverse\u2014and his activities certainly seem more creative than, for example, putting art onto a designer handbag.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Sachs is now operating in a different environment and sees an opportunity for greater relevance than today\u2019s art market alone tends to allow. He describes Nike, with its customer base estimated at more than 100 million, as a \u201cmegaphone\u201d for his ideas.<\/p>\n

More prosaically, the value of such collaborations with a business such as Nike, whose brand alone is estimated at more than $30bn, is likely to be more financially rewarding than fine art. Sachs has an increasingly ambitious practice to fund and his brand deals likely amount to much more than can be made from 50% of his art sales\u2014at Frieze Seoul in September, Ropac sold one of his sculptures for $90,000.<\/p>\n

Ropac\u2019s role is to keep Sachs artistically celebrated, including through international museum shows as well as the art market, and the gallery opened a Sachs solo show (including a coffee and mezcal bar) in its London space this month during the prime Frieze slot. Without such validation, brands would be less enthusiastic. But the arrival of agencies such as The Lede Company into the constellation of artistic representation underlines the latest reality, in which the market is limited, financially and promotionally. As Sachs tells The Art Newspaper, \u201cWorking with Nike is motivated by the idea that art takes many forms, and that the conventional museum-gallery-collector pipeline known as \u2018the Art World\u2019 isn\u2019t the most important thing about art.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The rules of artist representation are up for grabs in today\u2019s nervously experimental market. In August, a month…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239676,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[10346,6225,6485,6486,19384,20514,1120,96,72296,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-239675","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-art-market","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-artsanddesign","12":"tag-branding","13":"tag-commercial-galleries","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-thaddeus-ropac","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom","19":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}