As the story goes Marinetti dragged himself out of a muddy puddle, after a motor vehicle accident, and had an epiphany about the destiny of art. He may well be credited with a vision that lit the path for the future of modernism. From this moment on Marinetti created his Futurist movement and promoted it utilising every commercial and mass media means at his disposal. Newspapers, journals, his own publications and orchestrated art events known as serata futurista ("Futurist evening" or "Futurist soirée") that generated even more publicity where put at the movement’s service alongside the production of billboards posted around Italian cities proclaiming in large red letters “Futurism” (see Marketing Modernism: Marinetti as Publisher by Claudia Salaris). Searching for the lost “halo” of art that deposed aura as described in Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essay, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Marinetti attempts a fusion of art and the modern burgeoning world of mass communication, production and consumption.
Marinetti’s program was something typified by the modernist movement, that of a new art, being at once avant-garde and democratic, constructing a machine like aesthetic and a disregard for the formal conventions of the academy. Removing art from its elite and contemplative seclusion in bourgeois culture, Marinetti sees the future of art in the medium of the modern. As described by Claudia Salaris Marinetti’s program is a marriage of art and modern, industrialised society.
…What struck him in particular were two phenomena that were absolutely new and that plainly accompanied the development of modern society: on the one hand, industrialization, which, advancing in stages of sudden expansion, dissolves the pyramidal structure of an older social order in favour of massification, and on the other hand, the birth of popular political parties and unionisation. Both industry and politics possess their own linguistic registers enabling them to enter dialogue with a wide public, penetrating almost every level of society. Aiming at creating an avant-garde that would address a mass society, Marinetti introduced into the world of art precisely the kinds of communicative systems that typified the political avant-garde (verbal violence, techniques of agitation, meetings, etc.) and industrial advertising (hypervaluation in the representation of its own products, a massive use of posters, the launching of leaflets, etc.).
The use of the mass media to promote the cause of modernism was to be a feature of modernist art. In 1913 The Amory exhibition in New York was accused of diminishing the value of art by not only producing faddish works but also by promoting the products in a mass media marketing event. Art, according to the academy artists and connoisseurs, was not a popular cultural form to be promoted like the circus, but a discrete activity appreciated best in the mode of aesthetic contemplation far from the madding crowd.
(From Marketing Modern Art in America: From the Amory Show to the Department Store)
URLology
http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/italian/courses/handouts/Salaris.doc
Claudia Salaris describes Marinetti's use of modern marketing methods to promote his Futurist movement.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MUSEUM/Armory/marketing.html
An account of the use of marketing to promote the Amory Show.
http://www.nysun.com/article/36731
A contemporary article about the economic benefits of art museums.