Almighty painter

Chapter 580 Fashion Brands and Predictions

Unless someone like Banksy plays with anonymity.

The game is all about mystery.

if not.

Stay in the circle for three to five years, and then wait until you have been in it for a while.

As long as your professional status improves.

Then everyone will see each other every other day.

There was even a famous quote from the media.

Places like the Venice Art Festival are collective gatherings for top artists held every two years.

It is somewhat special that Kazunari Sakai would come to the United States to attend this year's publishing house awards ceremony.

Under normal circumstances.

Painters like Uncle Sakai tend to prefer classical traditional painting styles.

Today, when the organizing committee of an art evening held by an American publishing house was deciding on the list of invited guests, it was impossible to include him in the list.

Even if you circle them, they may not come.

It's like no matter how rich George Lucas is, or how awesome Star Wars is.

However, he is unlikely to be invited to any art film festival around the world.

Neither Venice nor Berlin.

Cannes awarded Lucas the Palme d'Or, but he was criticized by a large number of film critics, saying that the Palme d'Or had become "vulgar and decadent."

We are never going in the same direction, so why force ourselves to be together?

It's not necessary either.

Only compared to the relationship between Lucas and the Palme d'Or.

in the art world.

Uncle Sakai’s painting style is more serious.

He came to New York this year for a special purpose... and it certainly wasn't for the special purpose of eating donuts.

When Kazunari Sakai learned that there was such a thing as "International Donut Day" in this world, he immediately felt a sense of happiness from the inside out.

This has greatly increased his favorability towards New York. Currently, it ranks first among the candidates for Uncle Sakai's fourth hometown, along with Naples, which has an all-you-can-eat pizza festival, and Madrid, where there is a cheap buffet of paella and lasagna at a snack stand in front of the school.

Whether he can be officially selected or not will depend on whether he eats for another two days.

however,
He really didn't come to New York just for the donuts.

first.

The "Writing and Art Award" is a student award mainly for underage children.

The world of children often does not have so many complicated distinctions.

For the Writing and Art Awards.

Whether it will be classified by the media as a serious art award or a popular art award, the boundary between the two is far less than that of other similar awards.

Some times.

They may even invite the President of the United States or the UFC fighting champion.

Secondly.

Kazunari Sakai flew to New York. His main purpose was not to attend the publisher's award ceremony tonight, but to come to support his local predecessor Takashi Murakami at an art event in New York next month.

New York is considered the base camp for Takashi Murakami's art fans. After obtaining his doctorate degree from Tokyo Academy of Fine Arts, Murakami settled in New York and criticized traditional Japanese aesthetics for ten years. He then gradually developed an aesthetic path that integrates Japanese and Western cultures.

Kazunari Sakai hopes to successfully learn from Takashi Murakami.

By the way, after the publishing house's award ceremony today, I will discuss cooperation with Jane Arnold's illustration studio.

Award ceremonies, art festivals, art fairs, they are the battlefields for fame where young painters fight to the death across a narrow bridge.

After reaching the position of Kazunari Sakai.

The pattern is different.

Of course, even if it is not a battlefield, it still cannot escape the three words "Vanity Fair". Great painters will also quarrel with each other over who wins awards and who does not at top art exhibitions.

But in a sense.

This is also a good place for masters to discuss cooperation.

Especially if you are here to serve as a judge, or participate in a non-competitive section of an art festival, and there is no direct conflict of interest.

There will be far more cooperation than conflict.

It is even regarded as an annual vacation at public expense and an opportunity to meet friends.

This is the relationship between Kazunari Sakai and Jane Arnold. There are representatives of business companies acting as middlemen to bring them together to discuss the "future vision" of business.

Two or three hundred years ago, serious artists and commercial illustrators for tabloids were two completely different groups of people.

But since the fifties and sixties.

Throughout the Western art world, the distinction between serious art and entertainment art has begun to blur.

Artists can no longer be clearly categorized into a single category.

In the Victorian era, it was hard for people to imagine that a small artist who drew cartoons in newspapers could become a guest of honor of the royal family.

Before World War II, it was also hard to imagine that the PIN-UP (American military camp poster) artists who painted the kind of pictures of big-breasted blonde girls that would be sprayed on bombers and pasted on lockers in military camps to relieve loneliness for American soldiers, and who were involved in soft-pornographic art, would appear in the same art textbook as names like Jackson Pollock.

But in modern times.

The categories of artists have gradually dissolved.

On high-end celebrities.

This feature is more obvious.

Someone like Van Doorn, who runs a fashion artist clothing brand, cannot simply be classified as an illustrator.

If you call him an illustrator, he will not be happy. He will give himself the title of "innovative artist" or "cross-border artist".

Another example is Takashi Murakami, who doesn’t have a fancy reputation.

His works look very cartoony and comic, but they can all be traced back to certain traditional roots. They have a huge influence and have won awards. At the same time, they are also very commercially successful. He is a very successful painter who has collaborated with celebrities and commercial companies such as Kobe, Louis Vuitton, Yupa, Ferrari, etc.

It is also difficult for the media to distinguish whether he is a very traditional serious artist or a popular illustrator.

As Kazunari Sakai's previous contract with Ota Art Gallery is coming to an end.

Although the new gallery contract is still under negotiation among multiple parties, many commercial terms have begun to be gradually relaxed.

simply put.

This time when he came to New York, Kazunari Sakai came to make money, a lot of money.

A marketing company is planning to replicate the success of a Japanese painter, Takashi Murakami, in his personal cross-border brand.

They came over and planned to bring together the private studio of Kazunari Sakai, the most successful serious painter of classical oil painting in Japan in recent years, and the illustration studio of Jane Arnold, the winner of the "Master Award for Outstanding Contributions to Writing and Art".

Set up a bureau.

It was ready to tie the two masters together.

Debut as an idol right here.

Oh no.

The meaning is similar, it is to debut locally and create a trendy brand IP group.

This is a business that can really make big money.

What has been the most profitable industry in the art field in the past decade?

Drawing?
No.

Those who run trendy brands are the ones who make the most money.

In terms of the industry's contempt chain, Kazunari Sakai might not even look at Vandoorne in the eye.

As soon as he sat down, he would definitely press Van Dorn so hard that he couldn't breathe.

If you don’t believe me, let Van Dorn lie on the ground and he will try sitting on it.

But Vandoorne's fashion brand is so good that he can travel around the world on a Gulfstream. If critics criticize him, they will attack his fans all over the world.

Consumption behavior can represent a kind of identity.

We are all wearing clothes designed by Van Dorn that we paid hundreds of dollars for. You are the only one who is sober and criticizes Van Dorn's paintings as silly. Aren't you just selling everyone as stupid?

Not to mention Kanye.

People no longer buy Gulfstreams, they directly buy Boeing 747, the queen of the skies.

Just the money for that plane.

It may be equivalent to the total income of Kazunari Sakai and the gallery from selling paintings over the years.

Uncle Sakai might be able to afford a second-hand private jet.

But raising one will definitely be painful.

Even when my wife and daughter needed it urgently, I had to borrow the cheap and economical "Honda Accord" from friends, which is a HONDA JET among jet aircraft.

These years, everyone, human or ghost, is making trendy brands.

He is an athlete star and just wants to sell two T-shirts.

It’s because this thing has a low threshold and a high profit margin.

A piece of clothing costs only a few cents, but if it sells well, it can be worth thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands.

If the trendy brand IP is done well, it can be really profitable.

Don't underestimate the fact that Kazunari Sakai can sell a painting for $50.

But how many paintings can he paint in a year?
A "Takashi Murakami & Louis Vuitton" shopping bag costs tens of thousands of dollars, including the hype from scalpers. That was probably when it was released in the millennium.

Just in the Lv-themed shopping store in one area of ​​Manhattan, New York, he may have sold more than 50.

And this may be just the cheapest "Takashi Murakami IP" that ordinary people can buy. The rest of the watches and so on are the darlings of the rich.

akin.

Trendy toys jointly created by KAWS and Pop Mart, and clothing jointly created with Uniqlo.

From Hong Kong to Spain, fans queued for seven or eight hours to grab the products as soon as they were released, and then scalpers raised the price and continued to grab them.

This is no longer a matter of carrying money in sacks, this is robbing a bank with a large truck.

of course.

Trendy brand.

To be precise, just like any industry related to the "concept of art", the Matthew effect is reflected vividly.

You can never escape the fate of dying from drought or dying from flood.

Industries with low entry barriers and high profit margins are often huge industries.

Every year, a lot of people want to get into this industry.

If you randomly pick the football players in any Premier League team who are into branding, you might be able to pick out a few.

Anyone who fails to make a name for themselves will quickly lose money and go bankrupt.

What everyone makes is "recognition" money. Only when fans recognize your IP, you have a chance to survive.

So whether you are dealing with trendy clothing or trendy toys, there are always only two things that are truly important.

One is "brand level" and the other is "brand marketing".

The latter is the responsibility of the middleman.

His well-known commercial company will be responsible for communication with channel parties and marketing work, and they have extensive experience in this field.

As for the brand level, it is supported by two masters in the art world.

They plan to start with trendy toys first, and then slowly try to get involved in clothing brands where competition is more intense. After all, Kazunari Sakai is too round, and the selling point of the clothing brand needs to be further thought out.

They will spawn two different artist sub-series.

Uncle Sakai supports the IP's status.

He designs collectible trendy toys priced at more than $30,000, which are comparable to collector's edition artist toys such as KAWS and BE@BRICK (trendy brand Brick Bear).

Jane Arnold relies on his years of hard work in the field of fairy tales and his personal fame in the field of popular art to support those cartoon toys that can sell better.

It sounds like a promising idea.

When the middleman came to him and proposed this idea and business plan, Uncle Sakai was really moved.

He has heard about the lives of the IP partners of top fashion brands.

Gorgeous! Awesome! Absolutely amazing.

If this thing is done.

The brand can be established, and even after a few years, it can really form a kind of social recognition of your brand culture.

The artist's status is like the Beatles to the hippies and Lucas to Disney.

A leader-level figure.

The annual net profit of a large luxury fashion giant is more than the total transaction volume of the entire art world.

Buy a plane?
Humph.

He could totally buy an island in the Pacific Ocean, take his wife there to enjoy some time alone with his big belly hanging, then buy another island next to it and give it to Katsuko as her dowry, then buy a baseball glove and give it to Tsunamasa to urge him to get up early every day to exercise... Everyone gets a gift and a bright future!

How great.

This matter was discussed with a simple preliminary intention a few years ago.

The middleman was very welcoming and Uncle Sakai was full of expectations.

At last.

But unexpectedly, it got stuck with Jane Arnold and there was no response for a long time.

It’s not that Jane Arnold has no interest.

To be precise, it’s not that the vision is not beautiful enough, or that Jane Arnold Illustration Studio is dissatisfied with the distribution of interests among the three parties.

But it’s actually been in the last five or six years.

This master illustrator is in a state close to semi-retirement.

He rarely creates new art or appears in commercial settings anymore.

Jane Arnold announced that he wanted to return to his family.

It's like a free and easy wild crane.

In recent years, the other party has been focusing his main energy on his home in New Zealand, accompanying his son.

Uncle Sakai had heard about what happened in Jane Arnold's family.

What could he say?

He let out a sigh, feeling that compared to the son of old Mr. Jian Arnold, his own Sakai Tsunami was not as annoying to him.

It's just a bit regrettable.

There is almost one missing from any of the three parties.

This situation is hard to talk about.

If you really want to say it seriously.

The middleman can be replaced, and the great artist himself can be replaced.

Both sides can find replacements of the same level.

The only thing that really cannot be changed is Jane Arnold's illustration studio.

Although the middleman is a very capable tycoon in the business field who is good at manipulating people, advertising and marketing companies, channel dealers, etc. can all be found if needed.

Kazunari Sakai is not unique or irreplaceable.

At most, he can support the brand's style, but he cannot open up the breadth of the mass market.

There are actually many products on the market that are sold at super high prices.

A niche trendy toy or designer haute couture piece that costs tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions of dollars.

But this kind of brand is too niche and usually only sells one or two pieces, which is too boring.

That’s all.

Uncle Sakai might as well go back and lie down and continue painting and selling his paintings.

It's like among the luxury car brands in the world, the most profitable ones are never Bugatti, Koenigsegg, or the ultimate sports cars.

A car costs one million dollars.

We can sell forty or fifty cars at most, that's all.

With such huge marketing costs, when the economy is not so good, these brands will go bankrupt every now and then.

The most profitable ones are the well-known "ordinary" super luxury cars like Porsche, which have high public recognition. Rich people like to buy one as a status symbol.

The average price of a car is $100,000.

They can sell 400,000 vehicles a year.

Whether it can sell "forty" or "four hundred thousand" units, the key factor lies in Jane Arnold, the fairy tale master of illustration who once made most children in Europe and the United States, as well as most former children, put his works on the bedside.

In the business world, being popular has distinct advantages over being serious.

Just like in the film and television industry, there is a clear distinction between award-winning art films and commercial blockbusters. Only legendary films like "Gone with the Wind" and "Titanic" can achieve both fame and fortune.

In terms of sales, there are countless partners in the history of the Scholastic Group.

There is no doubt that the most successful writer in the writing field is JK Rowling.

An author who has sold 500 million books is qualified to make the entire board of directors kneel down and call him daddy.

And in the painting category, it’s Jane Arnold.

The total sales of his illustrations add up to nearly 100 million.

One hundred million people!

If one percent of the richest one percent of readers and fans can be converted into potential customers of the brand, it will be a very significant number.

Especially when it comes to trendy brands, comparison is extremely serious.

Everyone compares the worth of stars and the achievements of players.

We will also compare the status and popularity of artists.

With Van Dorn as an example, Van Dorn has already established a firm foothold in the industry. If he is replaced by someone who is inferior to the other in all aspects, fans will feel ashamed.

Winner takes all, it will always be just these four words.

Uncle Sakai originally thought that this matter would be shelved like countless other cooperation plans in the art field that had good visions but ultimately failed to take shape.

did not expect.

As luck would have it, he received an invitation from Jane Arnold some time ago, and it seemed that she had regained her energy and was ready to return to work.

The other party invited me to attend this year's "100th Anniversary of the Writing and Art Awards" award ceremony.

Uncle Sakai immediately came running over happily.

He was looking forward to it.

If this deal is done, even if he doesn't go home and buy an island, at least his masculinity will stand up. Even if his wife catches him eating donuts secretly, she won't punish him too harshly because he has made a contribution...

Probably, probably?
-
Osborne looked at Uncle Sakai, but he also failed to see the other's complicated mental activities.

He was not surprised that Kazunari Sakai would appear at today's award ceremony, nor was he surprised that he would run into him in New York. What was surprising was that he was alone, without an assistant, and that he would run into him in a place like this.

"You, are you also coming to take the bus alone?"

"Well, only when an artist takes a bus and tours the city, watching the sunset gradually fall, and the hazy evening scene outside the window merges with the hazy evening scene in his heart, can he truly grasp the pulse and heartbeat of the city..." Kazunari Sakai blew the calfskin casually, noticing Osborne's curious look at the donut in his arms, and took a small step back vigilantly, "Here, I caught this with great difficulty, I can't share it with you."

"No need, no need, just eat it."

Osborn was almost amused by Sakai Kazunari's reaction, and handed over the two that he had just picked up: "Why don't you take some too?"

Kazunari Sakai took 0.5 seconds to think about it.

He thought that giving him two donuts was within his conscience, so he shook his big belly happily: "O Kai O Kai, aligato."

He squeezed in through the bus door with the donuts in his hand, pulled out a plastic bag in the front and poured all the donuts in his hand into it.

Only then did he find a window seat in the back row of the bus and sat down comfortably.

He sat down on almost two seats, but this type of bus is usually very empty, with only about one-third of the seats occupied, so it was not a problem.

Osborne followed.

Sat down at the last seat next to it.

Kazunari Sakai glanced at the other person, then squeezed hard towards the inside of the seat to create a little more space.

Osborn successfully gained the favorability of Kazunari Sakai.

People who give him donuts are usually not bad people.

Osborne leaned his seat back and put down the front footrest, then he sat comfortably. While waiting for the bus to start, he took out the thick stack of brochures stuck in front of the seat.

A "Drama Night" package ticket on the sightseeing bus can be sold for nearly a hundred dollars, and the various supporting services are quite good.

Not only will there be a tour guide driving along the entire route, but these booklets are also printed every Monday and the content printed on them is very detailed.

There is a schedule of recent classical music rehearsals and performances at the Lincoln Center, a schedule of a series of special exhibitions recently held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as a detailed schedule of recent Broadway performances and who the main stars of each show are, etc.

Osborne quickly rolled to a back position.

Sure enough, I saw the related special page for the "Scholastic Group Centennial Review Gala".

He skipped the long introduction at the beginning and went straight to the winning predictions below.

The main award area is the student award for children, and there is no prediction of the winners.

Because Osborne knew that many of these winning predictions were basically arranged in order according to the handicaps offered by bookmakers.

Uncle Sam loves to gamble, from the winner of variety show competitions, to the Oscars, to major art festivals, and even to whether two boxing contestants talk before the start of a match, or whether they fist-bump or hug. There is nothing you can't bet on, except what you can't think of.

Moreover, the results of these major award predictions are often incredibly accurate. One Oscar judge even complained that before he even voted, a website had already posted the final list of winners on his door.

In other words, there are no dark horses in the so-called big prizes mentioned by the media in recent years.

Osborne glanced at the list of winners -

He didn't see Detective Cat's name on it.

(End of this chapter)