Abstract: The Artist’s Website. Discourse Features of Online Identity and Brand. The present study aims to reveal those discourse particularities displayed by the artist’s home page/website (used interchangeably for our current purposes ) as a device to create an artist’s online identity. Specific methods (and steps) throughout the process of creating an online identity overlap with the advertising strategies of branding. Our interest concerns the discourse strategies involved in the two activities in the context of online communication. The particularities of the artist’s home page have been studied from a genre analysis perspective. The aim is to demonstrate that the genre features of the home page (as a cyber genre) determine or at least influence the site’s content. The present research also aims to determine how the content is negotiated within the website’s structure to serve the communicative goals of establishing an online identity and an artist’s brand. The findings reveal several discourse strategies at play to reach the final purpose and that they belong to advertising and e-commerce, on the one hand, and the specialized field of the visual arts, on the other.

Keywords: Internet communication, WWW, digital genres, discourse features, artist identity and branding