This is sadly true IMHO. In many respects, the marketing campaign is the artistic endeavor. I can sort of see how this fits into the historical continuum, eg in a few centuries ago the church and the aristocracy were the commissioners and arbiters of art and in that highly politicized context artists produced portraits of the powerful and religious allegories because that was what the market demanded. Nowadays artists produce work that is reflective and glorificatory of global manufacturing supply chains and ultraspecific brand identity and are handsomely rewarded for their personification of otherwise abstract corporate values - Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons being the leading British and American practitioners of this post-modernistic aesthetic.

I think these artists are making a serious and successful artistic statement, albeit a highly indirect one. At the same time I find it sort of deplorable because I think art should be an intimate personal experience rather than a spectacular sociological one. Somehow I derive much more enjoyment from my own failed or inchoate than I do from most of what is promoted to me as art, with artists' statements that read like so much ad copy.