Why Art Fund asked students to show art's more accessible side in their 'own language'
How do you make art – a discipline all too often seen as high-brow – more accessible to cash-strapped students? You ‘meme-ify’ it, with their help. That’s exactly what charity Art Fund did for its recent ‘No Expertise Needed’ campaign.
No Expertise Needed
Discussing the process behind the work, Mark Elwood executive creative director at MullenLowe explained that his agency was tasked with promoting Art Fund's discounted student art pass which offers entry to a network of museums on a "comparatively small budget."
Central to the brief, said Elwood, was the need to “unlock and confront” art’s reputation as something exclusive, which led to it working with young people on the creative.
Since September, the organisation has been running a series of ads created by students, for students. The creative comprises traditional art pictured alongside meme-esque captions – for instance, Rodin’s ‘Man Awakening to Nature’ becomes ‘Man Got Gains’.
Other phrases that like ‘bare drama’ and ‘profile pic material’ feature in the ads and the concept isn’t too far away from Twitter meme accounts like ‘Medieval Reactions’.
“How can we prove that you can just enjoy art? The way we approached it was that it needed to be very topical” he explained, adding that finding a genuine voice that resonated was pertinent.
“I’m 46, I’m not going to write like a student,” he said.
So, to find that voice, the agency invited four students who had recently been recognised by the Young Creative Network to come work in their Shoreditch office for a week.
The four students included Curtis Reeve from The University of Bedford, Emily McCarthy from Nottingham Trent University, Weronika Prasek from Cardiff University and Krishan Kumar from UAL.
All four were tasked with breaking down the assumption that art can only be enjoyed by those with an arts degree.
Elwood said “the overriding thing about the art pass is that you don’t have to be an expert" adding, “there is a big pressure around art for young people. They can be scared and intimidated. ‘Should I have an opinion, is it valid – do I know enough?’”
Key to the campaign was breaking down the language barrier between the artistic world and the lexicon of students. Essentially, the agency wanted to communicate to students that they don’t need to be acquainted with the dialect of the artistic world to enjoy art.
Once the creative students were brought up to speed on agency processes and Mullenlow had “set up the feeling of what an ad agency actually does” Elwood says it was pretty free reign.”
He added that the creative shop encouraged the students to talk about art in their own words, and “use language of how a student might describe a painting.”
From this conversation the idea at heart of the ads was crystallised.
The campaign encourages students to: “just go out there and enjoy it" said Elwood. "You don’t have to love everything, you don’t have to hate everything – just have your own reaction and enjoy.”
Leveraging social media like speech, the campaign humorously aligns itself with contemporary culture, and the activity of young people online.
Addressing the fact that the campaign had a comparatively smaller budget to work with than other campaigns, Elwood said "It needed to be something that is really easily shareable by unis."
“It was a much smaller budget, and it has to be a lot more organic. We’ve thought about involving celebrities that have an organic feeling in the student world.”
