In one way, it doesn’t matter whether the question of a good name is applied to a work of art, a person, or an organisation or product. Any old name, used with consistency and conviction, would work. If you thought about the literal meaning, you probably wouldn’t buy food called “Birds Eye.” But this particular name is distinctive, memorable and ubiquitous, so it works. Very quickly after they’re launched, most names become meaningless signifiers—empty identifiers, as Mark says. People are interested in the art, the person, the product, not the word.

And yet, in another way, names do matter. No parent could choose a name for their child arbitrarily—we want a name we like. And in art, a title is a kind of interpretation of the work; it needs to be somehow illuminating (or deliberately refuse to be). Similarly, a brand name is a kind of interpretation of a product or company that says something about what the brand owner wants us all to think. In fact, I’ve spent most of this morning thinking of names for a professional-services client (yes, grown-ups do spend their Monday mornings doing this). The right name, or at least a good name, is a big deal.

So, in branding, what is a good name? I learned my lesson in this early in my days at Wolff Olins, almost twenty years ago. We were working for a mobile phone network that used a technology called personal communications networks, or PCN. My favorite option for the name was Pecan—a fun word based on PCN, a name both logical and neat. But our creative director knew we could do better. We could find something less literal, less logical, not denoting but connoting. A name that suggested warmth, optimism, “the world,” as he said, “through the eyes of a seven-year-old child.” That name was Orange. It quickly became one of the most successful names and brands in the history of the telecom business.

So when it comes to naming, I learned not to go for the bleeding obvious (to borrow a phrase from Monty Python) but to look for something oblique, with some mystery, some poetry, maybe even some art.

In some ways, Chamberlain’s titles anticipate today’s ubiquitous use of netspeak and text messaging with their terse, clipped language subject to specific constraints on length (140 characters is actually a bit long for an artwork title) with a consequential exploitation of abbreviation, acronyms, and numbers to communicate messages and capital letters to signify emphasis. Likewise, Chamberlain aligns himself with the literary tradition of “eye dialect,” the systematic manipulation of standard orthography to imitate actual sounds of a particular vernacular (Cone Yak = French “cognac”).

To help create his titles, Chamberlain maintained a long running list of words for inspiration; he also would write single words on numerous note cards that he would shuffle and select from. This procedure might appear to be random, capricious, and subjective, and it is true that Chamberlain himself asserted that the words revealed nothing about what they labeled. Nevertheless, his visually kinetic sculptures appear to have some correspondence to his self-proclaimed observations about the pictographic qualities (shapes, profiles, configuration) of letters and words.

The Guggenheim’s catalogue for the exhibition includes a fascinating annotated dictionary of a select number of Chamberlain’s titles. One aspect that unexpectedly stands out is their autobiographical nature. In essence, they recapitulate significant aspects of Chamberlain’s life—names of automobiles and their parts (the quintessential components of his art), his naval experience, places he lived, and friends and acquaintances. Such a procedure might cause the viewer of his sculptures to marvel at such an intensely personal “branding strategy.” While most art historians have situated his work within Abstract Expressionism, the pop-cultural allusions in the names of his works have contributed to his being designated a Pop artist, or something between the two.

Here is John Stuart Mill in 1843:

"When we name a child by the name Paul, or a dog by the name Caesar, these names are simply marks used to enable those individuals to be made subjects of discourse. It may be said, indeed, that we must have had some reason for giving them those names rather than others; and that is true; but the name, once given, is independent of the reason. A man may have been named John, because that was the name of his father; a town may have been named Dartmouth, because it is situated at the mouth of the Dart. But . . . if sand should choke up the mouth of the river, or an earthquake change its course, and remove it to a distance from the town, the name of the town would not necessarily be changed."

So calling a man “John” doesn’t describe him in the same way as such words as, say, “American sculptor” or “son of a saloon keeper.” Names work, according to the philosopher John Searle, “not as descriptions, but as pegs on which to hang descriptions.”

If names are nothing but pegs, won’t any peg do? Well, sure, to some extent. There was nothing to stop John Chamberlain from calling a hunk of twisted steel Miss Remember Ford in 1964, just as a Beatle was at liberty to dub his mop top “Arthur” that same year. By giving his works such seemingly arbitrary titles, Chamberlain was foregrounding how names at their most essential level function as mere “identifiers,” as Mark puts it, up to the whim of the namer.

Of course, it’s never quite that simple. Naming—be it naming a baby, a hairstyle, or a piece of art—is ultimately a social act. The bestower of a name, in the baptismal moment, is enmeshed in a web of cultural expectations. The namer can choose to flout those expectations with an unconventional choice, but that act of transgression requires certain conventions of naming in the first place. And even Chamberlain’s most “random” seeming names often had hidden rationales, drawn from his own personal experiences.

What fascinates me most about names is how, like any linguistic artifacts, they can travel from person to person and from place to place, taking on new shades of significance along the way. Even Harrison’s offhand cinematic joke to defuse an annoying reporter’s question had some unintended consequences. The following year, Sybil Burton, newly dumped by her husband Richard for Elizabeth Taylor, used her divorce money to set up a nightclub in New York. Inspired by Harrison’s wit, she called the club “Arthur.” And her house band, the Wild Ones, put out an album called The Arthur Sound.

I don’t know if Chamberlain ever caught the Wild Ones in 1965. He was probably too busy making sculptures named after other bands, like Kinks and Lovin’ Spoonful.