LG partners with Guggenheim Museum to promote brand, support artists

By Woo Jae-yeon

SEOUL, June 2 (Yonhap) -- LG Group said Thursday it will work with the Guggenheim Museum to promote its brand and support contemporary artists, in the increasingly overlapping worlds of art and technology.

It unveiled the Art & Technology Initiative at the museum in New York on Wednesday, under which the group and two LG affiliates -- LG Electronics and LG Display -- collaborate with the museum on supporting art and cultivating emerging artists for the next five years.

The globally renowned museum has three more branches: in Venice, Abu Dhabi and Bilbao, Spain.

Under the agreement, LG and the museum will created an annual award, the LG Guggenheim Award, to help finance innovative contemporary artists who devote themselves to creating digital artworks. An inaugural recipient will be announced next spring, the company said.

The Guggenheim Museum made the announcement during the 2022 Young Collectors Party on Wednesday night at the museum, which took place after a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The South Korean conglomerate will discover new artists under the Emerging Artist program every fall, and help them create and display their artwork on LG Electronics' organic light-emitting diode (OLED) TV, an increasingly popular device to feature artworks for its lifelike color and high resolution.

"The cooperation will help the two sides discover and develop the convergence of art and state-of-the-art technologies," LG said in a statement, adding that the new initiative is expected to boost "the creative image of the LG brand in the cutting-edge display sector."

LG has recently beefed up efforts to promote its products as a medium for art.

Last week, an NFT (non-fungible token) artwork by Turkish-American media artist Refik Anadol, which was displayed on LG Display's transparent OLED panel, was auctioned off for US$6.2 million.

"I understood how amazing OLED can be for communicating data paintings and data sculptures," LG quoted Anadol as saying.

"Especially, LG Display's Transparent OLED is a very exciting medium because you can really see through the medium of data like a holographic experience, while you are interacting with an artificial intelligence."

jaeyeon.woo@yna.co.kr
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