Art Meets Commerce

Full time artists have to be paid, and if they don’t have a Medici at their back, they need other angles. So a ton of art you’ll see in a city is in the service of businesses hoping to stand out from the crowd.

Sometimes it’s appropriated, like this life-sized cardboard cutout of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast At Tiffany’s. I didn’t go to the yard sale, but I can make some guesses what might be for sale based on an improvised sign like this.

Signs

Often the art is used to make signs pop and grab attention. This restaurant named “Five and Dime” is, appropriately enough, in a building that once housed a corner general store on the Woolworth’s model.

While this sign for Mona’s is a 3D representation of a bowl with chopsticks above, with the metal ties possibly representing noodles or wisps of steam.

Images As Images

And other times imagery is used independently of words to bond with people in a way that only pictures can. It’s a visual equivalent of the way jingles are used in ads to reach a part of the brain that simple slogans cannot.

Here is a black cat and steaming cauldron that appears on a store for candles and crystals.

Meanwhile this Mexican restaurant has a grab bag of imagery, including a mural in its alley along the lines of Mexican art from before the Spanish invasion, a stylized bean, and for reasons I don’t quite understand, a goat.

What’s the connection? Maybe there is none, and the owner just likes the art and figures that more is just better. Sometimes the best branding is no branding.