Anya’s Philosophy
Branding as Curation
As an art curator and theorist, I have learned that if I can successfully communicate the values of the world’s most abstract and elusive object—art—to a public, on historical, aesthetic, political, and financial levels, then I can do the same for anything: a shoe, a necklace, an app, a chair, and so forth. It is with this perspective from which I build each Maison Firestone project; namely, by using one the most intellectually and culturally required types of branding that exists: art curation. This is done in two ways:
Actively, by helping luxury brands and companies to collaborate across art, design, and craft in order to convey their heritage, value, and lifestyle identity through tactics beyond its creations;
Philosophically, by applying the perspective of a curator in order to care for (as curation’s etymology suggests) companies as artists—living, pulsating entities with a past, identity, and taste—and treat their creations as works of art.
First, a brief note to say that “curating” has become an overused term, decontextualized from its art-historical origin and largely misappropriated as an elite poser synonym for “arranging.” In actuality, one cannot “curate” a playlist nor a pizza in the full and proper sense of the word. In the museological framework from which it originated, curation entails the mediation of objects across a space with a predetermined strategy of how those objects are to be experienced.
The curator must translate complex, often obscure ideas for a public to comprehend. He or she cannot just assemble and show material objects, but importantly, must know how to show an objects’ immaterial values. How do we make a public understand why a painting, and not the copy you think your kid can do, possesses such global pertinence and worth?
To do so, we must pull from resources beyond art: history, literature, philosophy, politics, to tell the story of art through non-Art objects. And for fashion, the same must be done as well: use art and art de vivre—the art of living— to contextualize creations amidst culture.
Thus does Maison Firestone specialize in storytelling, taking the form of events, tours, and branding campaigns with a unique, multidisciplinary outlook built on culture.