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.”

The healing properties of folklore & Art

Two excerpts from two different articles in one of today’s newspapers (guess which?):

“Folklore has a moral center to it. Folklore is always, always, always on the side of the underdog,” she says, “and children have a natural instinct towards justice. They feel indignation at needless cruelty and wistfulness about acts of mercy and kindness.”
- Laura Schlitz in ‘A Late-Blooming Talent in Full Flower’ by Meghan Cox Gurdon

“Art leads man, in stages, from primitive sensuality to ultimate perfection — to a state of freedom and joy rooted in morality. The process involves a series of oppositions and syntheses — an antagonism of forces that results first in disintegration, and then in the creation of a new, joyful wholeness.”
- ‘Beethoven’s Summation’, Stuart Isacoff

I take it this insight is not lost on you marketers out there (WSJ)

Curating your ideas

In prior posts, I’ve looked at ways to use web 2.0 to enhance the organizing and sharing of ideas to enhance innovation and productivity.

Here’s an interesting parrallel from the art world (via the WSJournal), in which an art patron (Mrs. de Menil) and an architect (Renzo Piano), think about ways to organize and display vast amounts of art (16,000 pieces) in a limited space:

“The solution, the two concluded, was to rotate the Menil’s collection, exhibiting perhaps 10% of it at one time — hung generously spaced and at eye level — while the remainder “rested” upstairs, in accessible storage. Works would wait in the wings for their next call-back, a chance to be hung with a fresh curatorial idea, a new juxtaposition with other works, and always the possibility of deeper understanding.”

That sounds like a good design, doesn’t it? I wish it were that easy. Certainly, web 2.0 can help…

The mad contemporary art dance

Ooh, I’m watching this mad dance with fascination (from today’s IHT):

“It is, of course, no secret that the art market has become drunk with money of late, with major auctions routinely notching up record prices for artists old and new. In fact, never before have contemporary artists, from London to Leipzig, from New York to Shanghai, been at the center of such speculative fever. But £50 million for a diamond skull that cost £12 million to make? Even Russian oligarchs and hedge fund billionaires might think twice.”

Could Hirst’s piece mark the finale? When will the music stop?

Today’s Journal ventured a guess: when Sotheby’s stock price begins to decline (apparently, it’s been a reliable leading indicator of bursting art bubbles in the past).

Sotheby’s stock is down 10% over the past few weeks.

So, are recent sellers of Sotheby’s stock smarter than the people snapping up all of this “art”?

What’s driving the boom in postwar art?

From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

“This season’s two-week slate of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury could top $1 billion in sales, hard on the heels of another record $1 billion last fall. Sotheby’s alone claims it is selling five postwar-period “masterpieces” in a single night next Tuesday, most of them expected to bring in more than $20 million and some far more. In contrast, at auctions 15 years ago this month, the top-selling artwork fetched $7.7 million.”

I keep wondering how long this can last… what’s fueling this burgeoning art market? I’m going to risk ridicule and throw a few things out there: