Valuable business/life insights from a big artist

What can an artist teach us about working across mediums, pushing boundaries, the importance of failure, enjoying the process and innovation? A great deal, it seems, based on this incisive obituary in today’s IHT by Michael Kimmelman on Robert Rauschenberg.

Excerpts:

A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point… Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”

Wait, there’s more…

“… John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.”

… “I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop,” he said in an interview in the giant studio on Captiva in 2000. “At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.”

… “Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.”

A friend of mine likens himself a “cultural entrepreneur”. Robert Rauschenberg, it seems, was one.

Photo credit.

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