CNBC’s Robert Frank joins ‘Squawk Box’ with the latest news from the art market.

In the ever-evolving world of marketing, traditional advertising can feel like a pesky ghost – loud, disruptive, and often unwelcome. Enter ghost marketing, a strategy that flips the script, promoting products or services in a more subtle, indirect way. But how does social media, a platform known for its transparency, become a breeding ground for this spectral approach? Buckle up, marketers, because we’re about to delve into the world of ghost marketing and its hauntingly effective presence on social media.

What is Ghost Marketing and Why Does it Go Bump in the Night?

Ghost marketing, also known as stealth marketing, revolves around promoting a brand or product without directly mentioning it. Think of it as a secret agent on a mission, infiltrating the target audience’s space with cleverly disguised messaging. Companies utilise this approach for several reasons:

• Cutting Through the Advertising Graveyard:  Consumers are bombarded with traditional ads, leading to banner blindness. Ghost marketing offers a refreshingly subtle approach.
• Building Trust, Not Walls:  By focusing on organic content and building brand affinity, ghost marketing fosters trust and avoids the feeling of a hard sell.
• Leveraging the Power of Word-of-Mouth:  By sparking conversations and encouraging user-generated content (UGC), ghost marketing taps into the power of authentic recommendations.

Social Media: The Perfect Playground for Spectral Marketing

Social media platforms, with their emphasis on engagement and user-generated content, are a ghost marketer’s dream. Here’s how these platforms become prime real estate for this spectral strategy:

• Influencer Marketing with a Spectral Twist:  Partnering with influencers who organically showcase products within their content creates a sense of authenticity and social proof.
• Hashtag Hijinks:  Leveraging trending hashtags and subtly weaving brand messaging into the conversation can spark organic brand discovery.
• UGC Campaigns with a Boo-st:  Encouraging user-generated content through contests or challenges organically promotes the brand while fostering a sense of community.

Data Speaks Volumes (Even When It’s Whispering):

The effectiveness of ghost marketing is undeniable. A 2024 study by Marketing Dive revealed that 64% of consumers distrust traditional advertising, while 88%  say they trust recommendations from friends and family. Ghost marketing capitalises on this by fostering a more genuine connection with audiences.

The Two Sides of the Spectral Coin: Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages:

• Breaks Through the Noise:  Cuts through the advertising clutter and grabs attention with a more subtle approach.
• Builds Brand Loyalty:  Focuses on creating positive brand associations over a hard sell, fostering long-term brand loyalty.
• Measurable Results:  Engagement metrics can be tracked to gauge the effectiveness of social stealth campaigns.

Disadvantages:

• Requires Creativity and Patience:  Crafting compelling, indirect messaging takes time and effort.
• ROI Can Be Elusive:  Measuring the direct return on investment from social stealth campaigns can be challenging.
• Transparency is Key:  If a campaign’s inauthenticity is exposed, it can damage the brand’s reputation.

Taming the Spectral Force: Mastering Ghost Marketing on Social Media

Ghost marketing, when used strategically, can be a powerful tool for building brand awareness, fostering positive sentiment, and ultimately driving sales. Here are some key takeaways:

• Focus on Quality, Not Quantity:  Create compelling, indirect content that resonates with your target audience.
• Transparency is Your Ghostly Guide:  Avoid misleading tactics and maintain ethical practices to build trust.
• Measure and Adapt:  Track engagement metrics and adapt your strategy based on the data you collect.

Social media, with its focus on engagement and user-generated content, provides a fertile ground for ghost marketing. By embracing a subtle, strategic approach, marketers can build brand loyalty and achieve their marketing goals in a way that feels less like a noisy ghost and more like a captivating whisper.

‘I just don’t like eggs!’ is an unusual title for an art exhibition. It is a quote taken from an English art collector, Janet de Botton, and used by artist Andrea Fraser in her seminal performance work ‘May I Help You’ (1991), which is currently echoing throughout the galleries of Fondazione Antonio dalle Nogare, in Bolzano, northern Italy, reverberating with questions that cut to the core of the art market’s inner workings.

The retrospective brings together Fraser’s works made since the 1980s, focused on her research on art collectors, collecting and collections, broadly encompassing her archival impulse and investigations in psychoanalysis and sexuality, made approachable through her humorous lens.

Andrea Fraser, ‘I just don’t like eggs!’ at Fondazione Antonio dalle Nogare

Walking up to Fondazione Antonio dalle Nogare, an eco-brutalist space built by architect Walter Angonese on a picturesque hillside, the sound of muttered words and heavy doors slamming resonates throughout the courtyard. ‘I spent a few hours recording in a cell block,’ Fraser explains. CCI Tehachapi at King’s Road (2014) is a sound installation recorded at the California Correctional Institution Tehachapi, a maximum security prison. Fraser intended to draw parallels and contradictions between freedom and confinement, between sets of society that tend to not intersect: ‘These are extremes in society, between economic divisions, racial divisions, geographical divisions.’ Index II (2014) is a graph overlaid onto the entry window, its bars reflective of confinement, ‘visualising the parallels between prison construction, museum construction, wealth concentration and incarceration in the United States’.

Fondazione Antonio dalle Nogare serves not only as a public exhibition space and a repository for the eponymous founder’s collection, but also as a residence, where artworks coalesce with daily life. ‘The artworks circulating within these spaces serve as an interesting context for the exhibition,’ Fraser observes. It is in this intersection between private and public that her interests lie. Since the 1980s, Fraser has been analysing the workings of art marketing, peeling back its layers to question hierarchies and positions of power that in turn affect what is displayed in a museum. Four iterations of May I Help You play on loop, in which Fraser or actors perform monologues that oscillate between the veneer of salesmanship and alienation. ‘Culture is ordinary, culture is common,’ she explains. ‘Who are these people in art galleries, where do they get their money from?’ This question is at the crux of the exhibition: who decides what can be considered as an object of cultural value? 

Antonio dalle Nogare describes Fraser’s approach: ‘The artist’s sociological and psychoanalytic approach becomes the lens for questioning the art world and highlighting its contradictions, projections, wills, and wishes.’ Fondazione Antonio dalle Nogare itself illustrates the impact of collectors on the establishment of a museum, where personal taste and financial backing determine what is exhibited; all collections have a different focus or goal.

The exhibition begins with an installation titled Aren’t they lovely? (1992), exploring the mechanisms through which value is assigned and preserved within museum settings. A series of objects, including coins, medals, eyeglasses, photographs and souvenirs, a bequest of Therese Bonney, are on display in glass cabinets. Fraser found over 100 other objects from Bonney’s home in storage at the museum; Bonney had donated her entire collection to the University of California, Berkeley, but these objects remained uninventoried. The wall texts are museum curator notes, revealing the criteria applied to objects deemed worthy of being an artwork. ‘The wall texts are the most radical thing I’ve ever been allowed to do in a museum,’ Fraser explains. By reintroducing domestic culture and objects of only personal value alongside the works legitimised by museums into a public space, the artist short-circuits the value system proposed by the institution itself. 

Other works explore issues of plutocracy within art institutions. 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics (2018) is a vinyl installation of pie chart analysis and breakdown examining the relationships between politics and art institutions in the United States of America. ‘The work started with the realisation that I had in 2016 whilst at MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) at their Annual Gala. One of the members of the board told me that he had just become Trump’s campaign finance chair. The idea that someone supported Trump and was on the board of a museum was quite frustrating to me.’

Fraser researched 128 art museums, one from each federal state, during 2016 (the year Trump was elected), documenting the contributions to political parties or groups made by the boards of directors. ‘Board members are not necessarily patrons, however, they technically are because to be on a board you have to make personal financial contributions. These individuals are paying to play.’ The work highlights the undemocratic state of public institutions in the US, where those with expendable wealth are able to buy their way into roles of governance. In turn, museums and culture become saturated towards supporting certain groups or ideas over others. 

‘I just don’t like eggs!’ underscores the stark disparities between social groups, their priorities and freedoms, exposing the harsh realities of governance by the wealthy. These findings prompt pressing questions: Who wields authority over what defines art? How are museum displays curated? What dictates the value of art? Why are certain pieces prioritised over others? Who reigns supreme – artist, museum, or collector? And what forces drive shifts in the art market? As Fraser’s insights linger, these inquiries demand urgent exploration.

Andrea Fraser retrospective ‘I just don’t like eggs’ at Fondazione Antonio dalle Nogare until 22 February 2025

fondazioneantoniodallenogare.com

SALAMANCA — Come to the Ohi:yo’ Art Market this Saturday at the Seneca Allegany Resort and Casino to celebrate Native American resiliency through art and culture. The event is free and open to all from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Presented by the Onöhsagwë:de’ Cultural Center and Visit Seneca Nation at the casino’s event center, the art market will allow visitors to experience a juried art show featuring the fine works of approximately 50 Native American artists from nations all across the United States and Canada. Before the public event, an artist will be awarded a $7,000 Best of Show prize.

The day’s events will also include Hodinöhsö:ni’ social dancing at noon and 2 p.m., a plant sale by the Seneca Nation’s Gakwi:yo:h Farms, programming by the Seneca Language Department as well as a multi-faceted children’s area and a demonstration space called Dwahšönih, which means “we make it together.”

Dwahšönih is an interactive pop-up family area focused on Haudenosaunee cultural-arts-based learning for all ages. Visitors will work alongside artists and makers from the community to make objects to contribute to a larger piece of art that will evolve throughout the day. Cornhusk flowers will slowly form a wreath. Splints added by different visitors will come together to create a basket. Sewn squares will become a quilt and individual paintings will join together to make a mural, while everyone can enjoy eating traditional foods.

The central area of the structure will create a safe space for the smallest guests to play and explore while being encircled by artwork of cornhusk dolls dancing eskanye, as imagined by Randee Spruce. Facilitators include artists and makers Angie Ferguson, Bernadette Scott, Chandra Maracle, Cheryl Graham, Courtlyn Jones, Dan Hill, Holly John, Kira Bloxsom, Lauren Jimerson, Leeora White and Marissa Manitowabi.

“When the Seneca Nation of Indians opened the Onohsagwe:de’ Cultural Center in 2018, part of our vision was to utilize the center as a true hub where we could celebrate and continue to grow public awareness of Native culture and traditions on a larger scale,” said Seneca Nation President Rickey Armstrong, Sr. “The Ohi:yo’ Art Market is an exciting step along that path.”

Hayden Haynes, director of the Onöhsagwë:de’ Cultural Center, said organizers hope the new juried art market will become an annual event that will blossom into a leading destination for years to come.

“We want Native artists and our friends and neighbors from near and far to come together and join us in Ohi:yo’,” he said. “By sharing our creativity and works with one another, we can celebrate Native culture and resiliency through artistic expression.”

The Ohi:yo’ Art Market builds on the success of a juried art competition show, established in 2018, which the Seneca Nation hosted for Haudenosaunee artists. By inviting all native artists to attend and participate, organizers hope to develop the market as one of the premier art markets in the northeast.

Haynes said those shows were competitions while this new Ohi:yo’ Art Market event is more about Native American artists coming from all over to sell their art. He said, “In a lot of ways the competition is an incentive from not only a monetary standpoint but also from a recognition standpoint.

“Part of the mission of the cultural center is to create a major Native American art market in the northeast because there really isn’t anything like that here for all Native American people,” he continued. “Out west, they have the Santa Fe Indian Market in New Mexico, the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market in Phoenix, Arizona, and all those big shows that people come from all over the world to see. So, we are basically trying to establish a major art market in the northeast.”

Because the northeast doesn’t have Santa Fe and Phoenix weather, Haynes said the best option is to utilize the event center at the casino. He said it’s a beautiful space to have the art market, rain or shine.

The Seneca Allegany Resort and Casino is located at 777 Seneca Allegany Boulevard in Salamanca. For information, visit senecamuseum.org or call (716) 945-1760.

Since its establishment in 2016, the VH AWARD, hosted by Hyundai Motor Group, has offered a platform for emerging media artists to showcase their artistic expression and discuss diverse cultural and socio-political issues.

Artists interested in applying for the 6th VH AWARD can submit proposals to produce audiovisual screen-based artworks that may include but aren’t limited to video art, moving images, film, motion graphics, computer animation, gaming, and more. Individuals or collectives whose work engages with Asia may now submit applications through the VH AWARD website.

“The VH AWARD is globally recognized for its boundless exploration of participating artists from the Asian region, as well as those of Asian descent and diasporas from around the world,” said Dooeun Choi, art director of Hyundai Motor. “We eagerly anticipate the active participation of artists who embrace diversity and inclusion in shaping the past, present, and future of Asia.”

In 2021, the VH AWARD expanded its eligibility beyond South Korean artists to include those whose works creatively portray and question the vast array of issues across Asia. This expansion received a tremendous response, attracting diverse participants and remarkably enhancing the award’s stature as a global accolade. The award is gaining prominence as a significant platform for emerging media artists who engage with the context of Asia.

Screening at Vision Hall. Image courtesy of Hyundai Motor Group VH AWARD

For the 6th VH AWARD in 2024, applications will be reviewed by an international panel of jurors, who will select finalists based on their originality and aesthetics, compelling conception and innovation, quality of presentation, and sophisticated employment of technology. The jury members include accomplished artworld professionals such as Christl Baur, festival director of Ars Electronica; Sabine Himmelsbach, director of House of Electronic Arts; Martin Honzik, chief executive officer of Festival X; Sook-kyung Lee, director of the Whitworth; and Roderick Schrock, curator and executive director of Eyebeam.

The five finalists will each receive a $25,000 grant to produce new artworks. Additionally, through a partnership with Eyebeam, a prominent nonprofit art and technology center based in New York City, the finalists will be invited to an online residency program. Led by artists and curators from Eyebeam, the program will occur before the submission of their final works.

The recipient of the Grand Prix will be announced in June 2025 and receive an additional grant of $25,000. All works will be exhibited across various art institutions and platforms around the globe, including the Vision Hall of Hyundai Motor Group in Yongin, South Korea; the House of Electronic Arts in Basel, Switzerland; the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria; the National Art Council in Singapore; and other venues.

The call for entries closes at 11 a.m. EDT/12 a.m. KST on July 5, 2024. Applications with the required materials must be submitted online via the official VH AWARD website.

For more information, visit vhaward.com.

Installation view of the 5th VH AWARD. Image courtesy of Museum MACAN

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Sam Rodriguez sorts his works into three categories: nouns, verbs, and typography. Nouns comprises his portraits that zero in on a singular person and their expressions, while verbs takes a step back to portray figures in action. Typography is more abstract and centers on letterforms and graphics informed by Rodriguez’s early forays into graffiti.

These classifications help the San José-based illustrator “bring order to the chaos of making art,” freeing him to focus on the stories he wants to tell. Employing bold, chromatic palettes, Rodriguez superimposes symbols, signs, typography, cartoons, and patterns atop his subjects as a means of expression. The frenzied additions visualize the sitters’ unseen preoccupations and interests, whether it be a childhood love for Dragon Ball or verdant, cabbage-like clusters sprouting from a figure’s eyes.

In addition to his personal projects, Rodriguez has worked with dozens of brands including Adobe and The New Yorker and is currently collaborating with MF Doom on a collection to celebrate the 20th anniversary of MM…FOOD. He also recently released Human 2.0: A Celebration of Human Bionics with author Patrick Kane, a richly illustrated book about the incredible advancements in medical engineering.

You can find an archive of Rodriguez’s work and follow his upcoming projects on Instagram.

“Erny”

“Ampersand”

“Shelter in Place”

“Eglantyne”

“Flores-Ent”

“Specs”

“Song of Wind”

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“For me, the studio is a place of discovery,” says Jason Boyd Kinsella (previously). “It maybe sounds silly, but it’s a little bit like a Christmas morning when you get a gift, and you’re excited to open it because you don’t know what’s inside… Something is going to be revealed, and I am excited to see what it is.”

The unexpected encounters Kinsella describes arise naturally in his Oslo studio as he conjures enigmatic characters. Large-scale canvases—his preferred size is 20 x 100 centimeters—line the walls of the airy, industrial space and allow him to envision life-sized figures he confronts as he paints. This positioning creates a sort of dialogue between the two, which he approaches with openness and curiosity as if meeting someone for the first time.

Kinsella often begins with a rough, preliminary sketch that pulls on a few emotional threads and helps to lay the foundation for a temperament to emerge. “Looking back at (the sketches), very often I’m struck with the feeling that the person I’m looking at in one of these drawings is someone that’s very familiar to me. It’s really about discovering feeling as opposed to being super rational,” he adds.

“Mille (One)” (2023), oil on canvas, 73 x 61 inches

Like a jazz musician who practices improvisation and gains confidence in spontaneity, Kinsella has learned to follow his intuition. He might layer a pair of bubblegum pink planks or bisect a face with two peach columns, decisions that, like chord progressions and syncopation in an unrehearsed run, are made more interesting by their surrounding components. “You can look at sheet music and understand the individual notes themselves,” the artist says, “but it’s only when they’re assembled and played that you really get the true magic of it.”

He constructs a persona in the way that many of us build the public-facing identities flooding our social media profiles. His figures are complex but not messy, their feelings compartmentalized in perfectly round spheres and angled forms. Based on the 16 possible outcomes of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators, the subjects fit into neat constructions that resemble something familiar but are uniquely puzzled together, each shape nested into an individual spot.

The artist first encountered the personality test after his mother gifted him a book with the questions when he was growing up in Toronto. He answered the prompts and recognized himself in the outcomes: his introversion, intuition, and empathy were all easily identifiable. “There was this realization that we’re all made up of the same stuff, right? All of these simple components are very interchangeable depending on how you answer these questions,” he says. Although he didn’t think much about the book after that, it followed him around and slowly seeped into his practice, eventually becoming the backbone of his work.

“Connection” (2023), oil on canvas, 87 x 138 inches

Earlier this year, Kinsella opened Emotional Moonscapes at Perrotin in New York, where his painted portraits were on view alongside sculptures and video. In addition to singular figures, pairs of people appeared in this show for the first time. “The Twins” depicts siblings in pink and blue plainly conjoined by a horizontal bar, while “Connection” is more eager and complicated. Two seated characters inch forward in hopes of interacting, only to find the other just out of reach.

Like realistic portraits, these abstract personalities aren’t static. Experiences offer new perspectives, and over time, our understandings of ourselves and the world shift. Kinsella’s “Mille” portraits draw on the inevitability of change and portray a figure at varying points in life. The first in the series features a disjointed face that plays outward, while the second is tightly constructed, the same shapes rearranged into a recognizable but new configuration.

Stripping away outward appearances in favor of fundamentals, Kinsella looks to emotional DNA, how it sequences within an individual and replicates over time. As Max Lakin writes about the body of work, the artist’s “presence wrapped up in his pictures… a feeling that hangs between the shapes.” The portraits suggest that intimacy is about filling in the gaps and finding space where connections flourish. “If you want to know what’s happening in my life, just look at my work. I’m baked into every single piece,” Kinsella says.

In August, he will open his next exhibition, Ghost in the Machine, at Perrotin in Seoul. Until then, find more of his work on his website and Instagram.

“Mille (Two)” (2023), oil on canvas, 73 x 61 inches

“Rob” (2024), oil on canvas, 73 x 61 inches

“Susan” (2023), oil on canvas, 39 x 61 inches

“The Twins” (2023), acrylic and oil on canvas, 45 x 71 inches

“Michael” (2023), oil on canvas, 73 x 61 inches

The artist in his studio

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Following their lauded 2018 monograph, South African artist and activist Zanele Muholi has released a second book collecting the most recent additions to their series Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness. Volume II features 80 self-portraits shot in Muholi’s signature saturated black and white along with writings by ten contributors and a long-form interview.

Often adorned in objects like cameras or aluminum can tops that are common to the locations they visit, the artist centers themself in each image and returns the gaze to the viewer, a radical act as a Black queer person. “My practice as a visual activist looks at Black resistance—existence as well as insistence,” they said about the series.

Edited by Renée Mussai and published by Aperture, Volume II reflects on how Muholi’s portraits subvert art historical traditions and respond to the current moment. The book largely contains works taken after the onset of COVID-19, and therefore, many portraits incorporate essential goods like masks and water jugs. Capturing a particularly traumatic time, the photos are a striking and poignant reminder that the human body is vulnerable and worth safeguarding.

Ideas about protection arise frequently, as in works like “Baveziwe I,” which means “exposed to” in Zulu and portrays them swathed in thick fabric, just their face visible. “Taking charge of my representation is one way of dealing with the inevitability of exposure. You think you are covered, but you are not. We are always exposed,” Muholi says in the book. The series “is my way of creating and activating a space of photographic shelter, a personal archive.”

Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness: Volume II is available on Bookshop.

“Baveziwe I” (2021)

“Thathu I” (2019)

“Mihla IV” (2020)

“Aphelile IV” (2020)

Cover image: “Qiniso” (2019)

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Greenery abounds in the large-scale murals of Italian artist ONIRO, who often focuses on themes of interconnectedness and balance, especially between humans and the natural world. In “Coltivazione del Sé,” or “self-cultivation,” a human form emerges from the leaves and shadows of a burgeoning plant, while an opening of sky between branches reveals a facial silhouette in an untitled mural on an olive oil processing workshop.

In 2022, ONIRO completed an ambitious series that links three neighboring communities along the Via Aurelia, an ancient Roman artery in Italy constructed around 241 B.C.E. that remains a busy commercial thoroughfare today. “Each mural is a necessary part for the others, like organs that form an organism, and which as a whole has a greater value than the sum of the individual parts,” the artist says.

The three pieces in Organismo, or “body,” are composed in a loose, painterly style to depict Gaia—the ancient Greek goddess who personified the earth—an island shaped like the human heart, and a peninsula shaped like lungs with flowing, bronchial inlets. Explore more on Behance and Instagram.

Untitled, La Marina oil mill, San Donato Val Comino, Italy (2021)

“Organismo – Cuore” (2022), Comune di Castagneto Carducci, Italy

“Coltivazione del Sé”

Detail of “Coltivazione del Sé”

“Organismo – Polmoni” (2022), Comune di San Vincenzo, Italy

Aerial view of “Organismo – Polmoni.” Photo by Francesco Luongo

“Organismo – Gaia” (2022), Comune di Venturina Terme, Italy

“Casa del Fiume”

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