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GM finally cracks Japanese market, but not with cars

GM brands are hot among Japanese buyers. But it’s not cars they are buying. The buzz is around bicycles.

Bicycles with GM logos (all made in China) are sold at more than 3,000 retailers in Japan.

The Wall Street Journal reports: “Compared with the battleship gray or dull black utilitarian bikes stacked outside Japanese train stations and supermarkets, GM-brand bikes cut a more exciting profile—because of their mountain-bike styling, prominent logos and vivid colors.”

Top seller? The Hummer.

The Scream and the new phenomenon of art brands

As a universal symbol of anxiety, The Scream has become one of the most recognizable images in all art.

Edvard Munch’s garish cartoon of an agonized figure clutching his skull-like face has been widely reproduced on t-shirts, coffee mugs, Halloween masks and endless posters.

Art as brand. Brand as Art

For the privilege of owning this piece of cultural ubiquity a buyer has parted with $120 million, a record-setting price for a work sold at auction. One is bound to ask: $120 million? For this? Why?

“The art market is very motivated to pursue iconic works of art and things that can be considered trophies,” says one art expert.

What really happened here is part of the new phenomenon of art brands – works of art that combine a memorable name with a powerful, universally-recognized image.

Whistler’s Mother, Wood’s American Gothic, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and Munch’s The Scream have all achieved something that most paintings—regardless of their art historical importance or intrinsic beauty—have not: they communicate a specific meaning almost immediately to almost every viewer. Ipso facto, they are brands. And brands command a premium.

Andy Warhol shockingly anticipated this trend in 1962 with his work Campbell Soup Cans, demonstrating that the most banal trappings of modern civilization can, when transposed to canvas, become Art.

The Scream has arrived at the same place but from the opposite direction, out of the elite world of Art, lifted off the canvas, and transposed to the coffee cup and t-shirt banality of the modern world.

See also:

Branding Whistler’s Mother