Browsing by discipline "Art Theory, Criticism and Management"

Promoters are the most important intermediaries in concert industry, even though they are not always aware of the long term effects of their job. The aim of promotion in the concert industry is to properly present the artist and the genre of concert and to target the right segments of the audience. Their role is essential not only in the success of the single event, but also in the development of the artist’s career. The promotion of the correct artist’s image together with the concert is essential to reinforce the correct artistic identity of the artist. This aspect of the promoters’ job is even more relevant in the case of independent artists that are in charge of the production of their own work and in the case of artists that are involved in different projects at the same time and that present to their audience different genres of live concerts. The aim of this work is to better understand to what extent the job of promoters influences the image, reputation and artistic identity of international artists and their long term relationship with their audience and to what extent the audience is aware of this influence. In the audience’s perception, what exactly are the promoter’s responsibilities in the organisation of a live concert? What are the local and more broad consequences of the promotion of a concert or tour for the artist’s identity, reputation and career? The first part of this work analyses the job of promoters in the concert industry from a theoretical point of view, describing their relationship with the artists and with the other intermediaries in the field. The second part deepens the concepts of artistic identity and of artist as brand, and it presents and compares a series of posters analysing their effect as promotional tool. The third part of this work presents the result of a survey conducted among the audience and an extended interview with the artist presented as case study for the research. The results of this work show how often the importance of intermediaries is underestimated especially regarding some specific aspects of the concert industry, and how the problem is differently perceived by the audience and the artists. It also confirms how an improper promotion can deliver a wrong artist’s image, failing to target the right segments of the audience and potentially damaging the artist’s brand on a long term. Once all intermediaries involved in the concert industry will be aware of the long term effects that their job can have in the relationship between artist and audience, only then the promoters’ work will be able to actively contribute not only to the success of the live event but also to the development of the artist’s career, acting as positive reinforcement for the artist’s artistic identity.

According to Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon is an artist who has been enormously resourceful of stripping down narratological and representational elements from his paintings. It is the aim of the painting is to bring to pass invisible forces and convert them to visible, namely to embody a body without organs. A being is in a perpetual production under the multitude of both external and internal forces in a constant shift; even a being of sensation, namely an artwork, is in a constant shift while trying to embody a block of sensation, namely affects and percepts. In this lies also the problem of sensation: not all art can accomplish this embodiment. The Deleuzian logic of sensation boils down to freeing the Figure from all representation; becoming a fact, an Icon, which resembles only itself. In this thesis, the aim is to review if this liberation possible in a photograph by examining the photographic series Shadow Chamber by Roger Ballen. According to Deleuze, a photograph is doomed to its representative nature as well as in some ways an inferior artform to a painting, and as such is unable to attain the body without organs, the virtual body made purely by intensities. In order to harnest the forces, such a body needs to be produced where a sensation is able to occur. This is succeeded in the process of becoming-animal, where the affect turns a human into a non-human thus creating a body which can disappear to give a way for the pure sensation. This becoming-animal happens through infection and transference, not through resemblance; the aim is that neither, the human nor the animal can be recognised. Such a body can be called an Icon, in which pure intensities can pass and give forth a plane of consistency, a body without organs and ultimately a plane of immanence, namely the sameness, the pure difference . In Shadow Chamber, glimpses of these bodies without organs can be found, with the hope that a photograph might be considered as equivalently expressive artform as a painting.