Branding is not the creation of a logo. It is the creation of a perception.
When James Turrell began making art in the 1960s, the idea that an artwork could be a perceptual effect rather than a physical object was still novel.
Galleries struggled to understand how to package it, how, in Turrell’s words, to “sell blue sky and coloured air.”
This is precisely what many of the world’s most enduring brands, and destinations do.
St. Regis is not a bed. 15 Central park West is not a floor plan. Papagayo is not a collection of villas. Their value lies in how they alter perception how they make us feel, what they help us see, and the stories we tell ourselves while we are there.
When Turrell began making art in the 1960s, the idea that an artwork could be a perceptual effect rather than a physical object was still novel. Yet he sees his work as part of a long artistic tradition.
“If you look at the history of art, it’s littered with people doing work about light,” he says, namechecking Caravaggio, Rothko, Vermeer, the impressionists and Turner, whom he calls “probably the most prescient of all artists”.
At first, galleries didn’t understand how to package his immaterial, site-specific works; in his words, how to “sell blue sky and coloured air”. Sometimes audiences didn’t understand them either.
At a 1980 show at the Whitney, a woman leaned against a wall of light in a Turrell work, fell and hurt her wrist. She sued. It wasn’t until institutions and audiences began to embrace immersive, experiential installations by younger artists such as Olafur Eliasson that Turrell was recognised as a pioneer.
Tadao Ando once wrote of Turrell:
“Through light, he unsettles the very premise by which we see the world.”
The same might be said of the most successful brands, destinations, and works of architecture. Their greatest achievement is not what they are. It is how they change the way we perceive.
