6. Conclusion
This study shows how and why luxury brands systematically create and develop art-oriented policies. In order to reduce the negative effects of the ever-growing demand for their products and services, which ultimately leads to a decline in their rarity value and uniqueness, luxury brands have built a new artrelated paradigm, detached from the mechanical execution of mere product performance. The study shows that this paradigm revolves around four types of collaboration involving luxury brands and art, namely, Business Collaboration, Patronage, Foundations and Artistic Mentoring.
Art helps to neutralize the risks linked to the industrialization of luxury since it preserves a certain distance from the non-luxury world. Art therefore refocuses the luxury brand on its mission, conveying exclusivity and uniqueness, and thus allowing the brand to accentuate its distinguishing characteristics and affirm its timelessness. Art embodies luxury, which becomes an experience of esoteric artistic knowledge whose comprehensibility is complex, subtle and accessible to a select few only. Moreover, art is able to continually renew itself, especially when it is contemporary. This implies that its followers must constantly relearn the keys if they wish to access the new knowledge created, enabling luxury brands to relentlessly extend the distance with mass consumption. Thanks to the alchemy between luxury and art, the brand shifts from the world of ordinariness to that of extraordinariness. There is an obvious marriage of convenience in the proximity of luxury brands with the world of art.
