To the extent that luxury products and services become more easily accessible, luxury brand marketers must make luxury even more exclusive by making the consumer feel special and unique. Art lends itself willingly to this mission, because its accessibility is complex and its comprehensibility difficult.
From an in-depth analysis of the practices of the major worldwide brands in the luxury industry we identified that four main types of collaboration between a luxury brand and art exist, which are Business collaboration, Patronage, Foundations and Artistic mentoring.
The underlying mechanisms of these modes of connection between art and luxury brands are presented.
A model is presented which allows assessing the relevance of each of the ‘art to luxury brand’ binding modes, in accordance with the brand time perspective and the intensity of its engagement.

• Claude Chailan(University of Strasbourg, France)