Logos, lawyers and artists

July 25, 2011
techno trust

By way of a (pleasing?) break from Hackgate, we’re taking some time out to ponder the art world. It’s a fraught and curious one, all the more so in the present economy, which sees established international artists and those who service them – top-end galleries, agents and auction houses – continue to flourish but everyone else either struggling to stay afloat or going under.

Whichever category you’re in, what you certainly won’t relish is a lawsuit. Litigation just isn’t good for business. The only people who win, once a claim form is lodged at court, is the lawyers.

So much for the received wisdom, but this piece in a recent issue of the FT prompts a rethink. Its peg is the Danish artist Nadia Plesner, who has been involved in a long-running legal wrangle (is there any other kind?) with Louis Vuitton after she co-opted one of the company’s famous bags in her artwork. Claim and counter-claim have been made, and the present score appears to 1-1. A journalist with a pleasingly notable byline – Ryhmer Rigby – used this to ask what brands should do when artists use their trademarks.

The advice from the PR world was unequivocal. Brand consultant Robert Bean set the tone, advising a commonsense approach: “For the most part, if artists use your brand it’s of benefit to you. If they use it in a way you don’t like, then you have the right to get grumpy. But I’d keep quiet, rather than give them the oxygen of publicity. [The trouble] is that many businesses are so inward-looking and self-obsessed that they fail to see that a control-freak approach is counter-productive”.

Similarly, Mark Borkowski: “When brands try to do this sort of thing, far more goes wrong than goes right. You don’t want to chuck petrol on a fire.”

We agree. Brands need to fight their battles carefully, lest they end up like McDonalds, whose infamous McLibel litigation did the company far more harm than good.

But if you’re an artist, perhaps you shouldn’t fear the lawyers. Who knows, they might even do you some good. As if to prove this point, we mean Ms Plesner no disrespect when we say that until the FT brought her to our attention, we had never heard of her. We are now off to Google to see what she’s about.

Stop press: we have just seen from Nadia Plesner’s website that she is preoccupied with “The disappearing boundaries between the editorial and advertising departments in the media”. Interesting. Meanwhile, the image, by Static, is courtesy of the Belgrave Gallery St Ives.

 

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If you’re Joey Barton, attack is not the best form of defence

May 17, 2012

Interesting times, these, in the life of Joey Barton.

If the violence displayed by the QPR captain at Manchester City last Sunday was remarkable, his subsequent conduct on Twitter has been astonishing. Barton appears to have radically reinterpreted the notion that attack is the best form of defence, lashing out at all and sundry via a series of tweets whose ultimate effect is entirely self-destructive.

In the past 24 hours, Barton has accepted one charge of violent conduct at the Etihad Stadium but denied another. The FA seems set to throw the book at him, and his club has declared that it will deal with the matter after the result of the FA investigation. Conspiracy theorists might conclude that QPR’s management team and board hope that the FA ban Barton for so long a period (four months and more) that their reported desire to rip up his contract can only be bolstered.

What, then, should Barton do? Should he:

(a) Keep his head down and say nothing, or

(b) Issue a sensible statement in which he acknowledges that both his conduct at the Etihad and subsequent tweets have brought QPR into disrepute, and

(c) Add an apology to said statement, or

(d) Go to Portugal, log onto Twitter and tweet that the world is against him but that he doesn’t care because everyone is a moron and he’s worked really hard to get where he is and if anyone is nasty to him again he is going to expose their secrets.

The answer is not (d).

The moral of the story is that if you’re a loose cannon, when you turn attack into defence there is a danger that you will blow yourself up.

Gunning foglessly for clarity

May 15, 2012

A fine piece, this, on Winston Churchill’s gift for language and the obscurantism that goes with so much corporate communication.

But wait, what’s this? Could this injunction have been phrased rather more successfully:

Be concrete, not abstract. Use metaphors to get your message across.

Metaphors are, by definition, not exactly concrete. But be that as it may: there is a lot of sound advice in Clare Lynch’s piece and a revelation, too. We had never heard of the Gunning Fog Index.  But it exists, and reveals the age at which someone would have to leave full-time education to understand given text.

We’re pleased to display our own Gunning Fog rating for the above words. That of the Churchill speech cited by Ms Lynch was 9.698.

The Gunning Fog index is 9.585

Spin at the Leveson Inquiry

May 9, 2012
Leveson witch hunt

The idea that Lord Justice Leveson and his Inquiry’s QC, Robert Jay, are in need of PR advice is intriguing.

Surely their respective tasks ought to be immune from spin? Then again, perhaps the way in which they execute them is deserving of some communications advice. Either way, times have changed. A similar inquiry from yesteryear (and such do exist) would surely not have been accompanied, albeit informally, by communications advice.

Pictured courtesy of this Flickr user: a portrait of the Leveson Inquiry.