When Societal Critique Becomes Artistic Value: Theorizing Societal Marketing in Contemporary Art

[PRE-RELEASED VERSION]

Jin Woo Lee, Marios Samdanis

Jin Woo Lee, PhD in Management, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Performing Arts and Culture, at the Catholic University of Korea. His research mainly focuses on the process of legitimating visual artists in the context of structural changes in the art world by the emergence of technologies.
Marios Samdanis, PhD in Management, is Senior Lecturer at Brunel Business School, Brunel University of London. His research explores artistic innovation in contemporary art, digital technologies in the art world, and the institutional dynamics shaping cultural production and consumption.

ABSTRACT
This study reconceptualizes societal marketing in the context of contemporary art by examining how artists operate as socially engaged cultural producers whose work moves across artistic, media, institutional, and market contexts. Focusing on Banksy’s oeuvre and his interventions in Ukraine, the study analyses how socio-political critique is not only embedded in artworks, but also mediated, circulated, and translated into artistic identity and symbolic brand value. Drawing on Botti’s (2000) framework of artistic value creation and diffusion, the study develops a process model of societal marketing in the arts organized around three interrelated levels: Embedded critique, identity formatting, and brand integration. Banksy’s practice shows how political intervention, transmedia circulation, authentication practices, and selective institutional engagement reinforce one another in the production of meaning, recognition, and value. The study extends Botti’s framework by showing that artistic value and societal critique are not only diffused through external intermediaries and publics, but are also partly shaped by artists themselves through mediated circulation and brand-related practices. In doing so, the study advances societal marketing theory by shifting attention from normative prescriptions about social responsibility towards an analytical understanding of how social issues are mobilized, mediated, stabilized, and valued within the contemporary art world.
KEYWORDS
Banksy; societal marketing; social critique; contemporary art; artistic value