Masterpiece Gallery
Introduction
Masterpiece is a global Coca-Cola campaign built around a short film where a Coke bottle travels from painting to painting, Andy Warhol's 1962 Coca-Cola, Turner's The Shipwreck, Munch's The Scream, Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles, finally reaching Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, whose subject hands the bottle to an uninspired art student. The film bridges historical masterworks with emerging contemporary artists from Africa, India, the Middle East, and Latin America.
I designed the companion virtual museum, a digital gallery giving people a place to actually spend time with the artwork the film only shows for seconds, and to hear directly from the emerging artists whose work sits alongside centuries-old masterpieces.
Process
Structuring a Museum Around Two Different Kinds of Art
The core design problem was giving equal weight to two very different registers of work: museum-grade historical paintings on loan through institutions like the Tate and the Art Institute of Chicago, and living, working artists whose pieces had never hung anywhere close to a Vermeer. I split the museum into two distinct galleries, Highlighted Artwork for pieces that appear directly in the film, and Featured Artwork for supporting pieces that shaped its tone, so neither category read as a footnote to the other.
Letting the Artists Speak for Themselves
Below the galleries, a series of video interviews lets the emerging artists talk about their own work in their own words. I placed these after the galleries deliberately, art first, then context, so a visitor's first impression of the work stayed on the piece itself before hearing the artist's perspective.
Designing Attribution at Museum Scale
Every piece in the museum carries a formal, museum style credit line, sourced through rights holders including Bridgeman Images, Tate, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Getting a consistent, unobtrusive attribution pattern working across dozens of pieces from entirely different institutions was a quieter but real part of the system, the kind of detail a museum visitor never consciously notices unless it's missing.
Conclusion
The film went on to win a Bronze Lion in the Film Craft category at Cannes Lions 2023, with four additional shortlists.
