It’s supposed to be a good thing when art meets marketing, because marketing bridges the gap between a piece of art and those who appreciate it. However, it becomes almost nauseating when art actually is the marketing. An e-mail from the Kluger Agency, who represents Mariah Carey and Ludacris, proposed offering the owner of Double Happiness Jeans, a virtual sweatshop in Second Life, an opportunity to include Double Happiness Jeans, with the right price, in the lyrics of an upcoming Pussycat Dolls song. While Pussycat Dolls is not a band with too much integrity that will cause heart attacks to their fans, it’s still scary to imagine the possibility of other artists writing songs to advertise products and companies that pay them.

However, who is to blame? Digital music and file sharing have forced the musicians to scour for new revenue sources. Music itself has become less of a product, but more of marketing, branding, merchandising, and targeting rolled into one. This trend can be verified by the fact that more and more major artists such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails offer their music for free or whatever price people want to pay. Licensing deals, brand extensions, product lines, live events, movie and TV deals are where the money really is.

What about the contemporary art industry? The sales shows that an art piece is still the product, one that can sell for millions of dollars. Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the two main auction houses, together sold an eye-popping $12.5 billion in artwork last year—an annual increase of more than 40 percent. However, who determines the value of an art piece? Artists?  Buyers? Dealers? Or galleries? My answer is the marketing. Marketing stimulates demand, marketing creates a social status of ownership, and then marketing determines the value of an art piece. The success of some of the most popular artists throughout history is often due to their performance as businessmen. Damien Hirst, undeniably the most profitable artist alive, was once accused by The New York Times of being less of an artist than “the manager of the hedge fund of Damien Hirst’s art.” And as we all know, Andy Warhol once observed: “Good business is the best art.”

Art, when it meets marketing, sells.