Can co-opting celebrities, luxury and fossils power up the art business?

The UK has a new football team founded by YouTube influencers, called Beta Squad FC, that recently played a well-attended charity match against an opposing side featuring “the all-time most subscribed Twitch streamer Kai Cenat”. (Thank you, Wikipedia.) Although some trained footballers were on the pitch, the concept was less about sport—there wasn’t even a final result, owing to a pitch invasion—and more about reach and entertainment.

What has this got to do with art? Well, our world, too, has entered a phase where personalities and entertainment have begun to buttress the usual structures—be they art fairs, auctions or exhibitions—as well as the foundation beneath them: fine art to hang on walls.

This season in London, in place of its usual contemporary and Modern art evening sale, Christie’s brought us a live auction of the wardrobe of the late fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, expertly artified by the auction house as being “akin to Surrealism and the ways in which a familiar scene is transmogrified”. Last year, Sotheby’s sold the collection of the late Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, for which the greatest demand centred not on the handful of paintings and objets d’art he owned but rather on the personal items he touched, including a moustache comb, a kimono worn on stage and even the door to his home. Sotheby’s also announced that this summer (17 July) it planned to offer the bones of a 150-million-year-old stegosaurus with the stage name Apex— impressive and important, but not something we learned about in art history classes.

The trappings of wealth

This broadening of offerings is not so much an abandonment of art as it is a move towards a different way of consuming it—pun intended, as fine food plays a part. Luxury brands, often the leaders of art market trends, are catering to the changing nature of unnecessary goods, now that much of the necessary can be bought online. This means more storytelling and celebrity partnerships within a wider, more connected and inherently physical scene.

Art has a significant place in this cross-selling orbit. Belmond, the LVMH company that runs luxury hotels and travel services such as the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, has gone beyond leveraging its parent company’s brands by adding Dior spas to its trains. It has also launched a residency for photographers and served as the lead sponsor for this past May’s Photo London fair.

Smaller art businesses, including commercial galleries, can choose to ignore the art-as-luxury consumer and continue serving their niche audiences. But bigger businesses—including auction houses, art fairs and museums—know that they need luxury brands’ financial support and connections to more geographically diverse and younger crowds, as well as their capacity to please ever-demanding regulars. Witness Hauser & Wirth’s sister business of hotels, restaurants and private-member clubs, or the launch of Art Basel’s first “concept store” at this year’s fair. (Biscuits for $56 seems to go beyond the category of “necessary”.)

Jenna Littler, a fashion industry adviser, says: “Luxury has always been about desire, not need, and the most precious commodity is not money but time.” Today’s rich crowd still wants to spend its most precious commodity on art, only now with other once-siloed trappings of wealth, from dinosaurs to footballing influencers, as part of the package.