| |
 |
| © David Deising |
| Mark Balet and Beatrice Dupire |
Marc Balet and Beatrice Dupire
Co-creators, Th(e) Influencer
On List Because: Their new book project is the ultimate confluence of art and commerce
Secret of Their Success: Intelligence combined with intuition
Quote: "Certain people understand these signals. Others don't."
We live in a world where the distinction between art and commerce is negligible. The confluence of those two impulses -- to create and to consume -- can be traced back to the 1960s, when the idea of "lifestyle" gained currency and people everywhere began looking for ways to express themselves through the products they purchased. Suddenly a million marketing wizards had a new way to tap into people's souls, because the path to self-actualization led to immodest consumption.
Decades later, art director Marc Balet and photo curator Beatrice Dupire have come up with their own product, one that may be the ultimate expression of our modern desire to find truth, beauty, and brilliant industrial design in one place. The product is old school: a 474-page book with soft covers and visible stitching and the folio edges of the individual pages exposed on the spine. It is, in fact, a sophisticated art book disguised as a workbook. Or, rather, it is both, and nothing like it has ever been seen.
 Called Th(e) Influencer, the book is designed to be a marketing tool that consumer-product companies will use to understand the global visual culture. Only 2,000 copies of the initial edition (out in July) were printed, each costing $7,500. For that steep price, buyers, such as Estée Lauder, get a compilation of some 2,000 images, culled from 5,000 collected by Dupire during the previous six months. "These companies look at the world and they see all this imagery, and they want to know what it all means," says Balet, a former creative director of Andy Warhol's Interview. As Dupire told Women's Wear Daily, "Some people can truly get an inspiration from the artist to open some doors and make better access to the consumer markets." Balet views the photos in Th(e) Influencer as "smoke signals" that tell where the spiritual center of the culture is: "Certain people can read these signals. Others can't."
The book takes a pragmatic tack, offering keywords at the beginning of each section to provide marketers with shortcuts into the consumer's mind. The first edition features work by fashion photographers like Craig McDean, Karl Lagerfeld, Collier Schorr, and Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, as well as fine-art photographers and photojournalists; the images focus on what Dupire calls "a sense of heaviness and anxiety in people's lives." The good news for marketers, says Dupire, is that this anxiety might express itself as an urge to buy luxury goods, as a way to project personal power over an uncertain world. The message is right there, in the pictures.
|
