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An intriguing development in the realm of commercial software has arisen over the last decade, from highly improbable beginnings. From its inception in the ‘hacker ethic’, freeware has had a huge impact on IT businesses around the world, most strongly in the guise of its spin‐off, open source software. The eventual consequences are that, for example, more than 60% of all the servers on the World Wide Web are running the Apache open source system, and Linux, the open source cousin of Unix, is challenging Microsoft’s products as the most popular business server operating system. Major IT users such as multinational banks, and major IT companies including IBM, Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Oracle, Informix, Intel, Fujitsu, AMD and Computer Associates are investing in and supporting Linux. In 1998, Netscape Communications made public (‘opened’) the source code for its Netscape web browser. In 1999 Apple published the source for the ‘Darwin’ core of its Mac OS X. The Perl freeware programming language continues to gain popularity for web‐based applications.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the connections between art and marketing in order to develop enhanced insight into how visual art and the art world can inform marketing theory and practice.

An indepth analysis of a range of relevant literatures is carried out in order to heighten understanding of art as a way of knowing within the marketing discipline. A range of meanings of art and marketing are considered and an analysis of their intersections is carried out.

A number of useful concepts are developed, including that of the marketing manager as an artist. Viewing marketing through visual art is seen as an avant garde response to addressing the continuing theory/practice gap.

Following an art‐based way of knowing in marketing has the potential to challenge more mainstream paths of thinking by opening up the ways in which we visualise marketing theory and practice. Thinking about marketing through art should not be seen as a general panacea for addressing current inadequacies of marketing theory, but should instead be viewed as an alternative mechanism in which contemporary marketing theory and practice can be enriched by the transference and juxtapositioning of art‐based thought with long established ways of thinking about marketing.

Artistic creativity is seen as a key factor in stimulating marketing decisions. Viewing the marketer as artist also mirrors the actual behaviour of the marketing manager by providing insight into intuitive thought processes and visualisation techniques.

Arts marketing research in general is making progress in terms of its theoretical and practical contributions to the wider marketing discipline. It is believed that papers such as this will contribute to the ongoing research agenda by stimulating much needed critical debate.