This article examines the role of marketing in the arts. Reflecting on the issue requires an understanding of both the meaning of artistic value and its diffusion process. Artistic value can be seen as a flow potential embedded in a product that may or may not be recognized by those who encounter it. When artistic potential is recognized, it is diffused on a social level and marketing is drawn in. The diffusion process can be broken down into different stages that link the artist to the wider public. Along this path, artistic value is transformed from an emergent state to an emergedﾝ one, and also acquires social and economic value. Marketing attends to the services managed by the subjects who transfer the artistic value from the artist to the public in order to increase the emergent artistic potential or to enhance the emerged one. Different services and marketing tools are used at each stage of the diffusion process. (Publisher's description)

This article examines the role of marketing in the arts. Reflecting on the issue requires an understanding of both the meaning of artistic value and its diffusion process. Artistic value can be seen as a flow potential embedded in a product that may or may not be recognized by those who encounter it.