creativity

A Manufactured Rival Might Be Better For You Than An Actual Rival

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I am taking some time off to spend with family so I am plumbing into the archives again for a bit.

A few years back, I wrote about a company that didn’t feel they had enough competitors to force them to be innovative so they invented one.

Nothing consolidates a team and brushes away internal squabbles like the threat of a common enemy. Because ePrize’s next largest competitor is too small to raise their blood temperature, the company created Slither Corp.

By asking its employees what they think their counterpart at Slither would do differently, Linker says ePrize “creates a fun, safe opening for continual discussion about what the company could do better.”

Ask yourself these three questions to see if a threat can unblock your business’ innovations.

Who or what is our worst enemy?
What is our enemy doing that we can do better?
Can we create an enemy to spark new ideas?

Since most arts organizations probably feel they have no lack of competition, I had suggested using a fictitious enemy to remove some of the emotional associations which might get in the way of objectively addressing issues the organization may face.

It can be difficult to get motivated to do better if you perceive that the other organizations in town get all the grants, have the more affluent donors, get more recognition, get the benefit of the doubt when they make missteps, etc.  It is easy to make excuses why you will never succeed if you are focused on how great other people are rather than your own successes and capabilities.

The suggestion I made back then is worth considering.  Essentially, competing against the pretend rival you inflate in your mind might be more constructive than competing against the actual rival who you have inflated in your mind.

By creating an imaginary enemy, you can concentrate on responding to events without the emotional subtext lurking beneath the conversations. Yes, there are plenty of groups out there eating your lunch, but your biggest problem is The House of Extraordinary Matinee idols. (THEM) Your fictional enemy, THEM, noting the trend of sold out shows has decided to program seasons of 100% musicals. How do you position your next season in relation to this imagined challenge?

The fictional enemy doesn’t have to be a proxy for an actual rival in the community, it just has to present a credible challenge to your organization in order to spur innovation and creative thinking.

Wait, Look Behind You

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I don’t remember where I came across this recently since the story is over a year old. Photographer Oliver Curtis embarked on an interesting project where he started taking pictures with his back to famous landmarks.

The project came about back in 2012, when Curtis was visiting the Pyramids of Giza. Upon turning around, he realized that he had never seen the “hidden side” of that well-known place. So, he began documenting these views in a project of his own…

In each of the photos in the series, captured over the past 4 years, the viewer is told where the photo was captured and is invited to look upon the scene without the smallest glimpse of the actual landmark that people visit from all over the world to see.

The full collection of images for the Volte-Face project are on the artist’s website. If you want the challenge of trying to guess where things are without the benefit of visible captions, you should view it there.

He has images facing away from the Statue of Liberty, The Great Wall of China, Taj Mahal, Buckingham Palace and dozens of other places.

What initially hooked me was his photograph facing away from the Mona Lisa. We hear tales of people rushing through the Louvre and crowding in front of the painting trying to get a picture. It either wasn’t crowded in the gallery when he took the picture or he stood with his back to the crowd.  The sense of this is what you are missing if you focus solely on the famous was interesting to me.

I won’t claim to always be observant and absorb all my surroundings when I am visiting a famous place, but I think I do a pretty good job of taking in my surroundings.

What is sometimes surprising is just how mundane and unassuming some of the places appear when you have your back turned to them.  The bench and pool in front of the Taj Mahal, you would expect based on pictures of the landmark. However, the fresh tree stump and apartment buildings taken while facing away from the Eiffel Tower makes you wonder how close to the structure he was when he took the picture.  The same with the utterly unremarkable view away from the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

Piquing The Artistic Impulse

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A little irreverence today after talking about philosophical questions like “what is art for?”

In the past few years, I have done a lot of writing about the need to help people recognize they have the capacity to be creative.

When I was in Pittsburgh a couple weeks ago, I visited the Warhol Museum and found myself inspired by some of the projects he engaged in. Much of what he did was an attempt to take the idea of art off a pedestal and bring it into everyday experience.

There was one piece in particular that appealed to me, though perhaps for the wrong reasons.

Among the museum collection was one of Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings. The piece was created by priming the canvas with metallic paint and then applying a substance that would cause a oxidation reaction.

In Warhol’s case, it was urine.

According to the card next to the painting, he and his friends and assistants:

“…experimented with both pattern and coloration…Variations in the maker’s fluid and food intake affected the oxidation impact…Warhol was particularly thrilled by the striking colorations caused by his studio assistant Ronnie Cutrone, who was taking vitamin B supplements.

Oxidation Painting, 1978

As much as you may be disgusted by the idea, (and lets face it, most paint is more toxic than urine), you have to admit that the technique would definitely pique the interest and desire to experiment in many people.

Okay, sure it might be more appealing to younger males and females, but males often see art as an effeminate activity as it. This is a way to engage more men!

I will confess that I sent this picture and information about how it was made to my friends who hold creative process events and made a tongue-in-cheek suggestion this be the next project.   While you can’t create an authentic relationship with creativity and the arts through stunt events like this, the example of it can combat the image of art as staid and inscrutable.

Even if someone looks at the painting above and says it isn’t art based on appearance alone, they can at least connect with the impulse behind its creation because everyone has had a related impulse at some point in their lives. (And may even continue to harbor that impulse in their hearts.)  You have an entirely different conversation and relationship with this piece than you would have if Warhol used ink or paint to create images many might associate with Rorschach blots.

Art As Currency For Experience

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This week Diane Ragsdale wrote a piece addressing the difficultly people have with the idea of Art for Arts Sake.  She says when she conducts workshops and asks arts administration types to fill in the blank in the phrase, Art for ____________’s sake, they never say “art.” In discussions, people aren’t able to really define what is meant by “art for art’s sake.”

She suggests part of the issue has to do with the way we define value. She uses the example of an artist she invited to speak in her class. When the artist asked if there were any questions, a business student asked if she was being responsive to the market by painting so many orchids. The artist said she was basically painting orchids because she enjoyed exploring the form and would do so until it no longer interested her.

After the fact, as I reflected on this moment, I thought it was quite brilliant. A quite reasonable question from a business school student: Is there sufficient demand for orchids? Do you know your market? Do you think you may need to diversify?

And a quite reasonable answer from an arts student: I’m interested in the idea for its own sake; right now, I’m not thinking about whether there is a market for orchids.

And I could not have architected a better moment to convey the different logics or rationalities of business and art, or what art for art’s sake, or research for the sake of research, or exploration for the sake of exploration, or excellence for the sake of excellence are all about. Through this brief conversation between an artist and  business student, I was able to experience the world of business and the world of art as parallel systems of value. This experience finally helped me make sense of, and come to terms with, the phrase art for art’s sake.

Ragsdale provides a chart created by Bill Sharpe discussing “five “economies” and their “shared denominations of value.”” For example, in competitive games, the currency is the score; in democracy, it is votes; in exchange, it is money; and in experience, it is art.

She says,

What Sharpe’s framework seeks to illustrate is the incommensurate nature of these various currencies of shared valuation. The score of a sports game may tell us who won or lost but it can’t help us understand the individual or shared experience of the game, for example.

For me, this coalesced ideas that Carter Gillies wrote in a guest post for Ragdale’s blog (my emphasis):

They value the economy? Well, the arts are good for the economy! They think that cognitive development is important? Well, the arts are good for cognitive development! We make our own ends the means to their ends.

But this never teaches them why we value the arts. It is not a conversation that discusses the arts the way we feel about them. Its not a picture of the intrinsic value of the arts, because in talking about instrumentality we always make the arts subservient.

Just as the score of a baseball game can’t describe the experience of attending, many of the criteria people wish to apply to the arts aren’t relevant as a measure of value. Arts may be good for the economy insomuch as an exchange is taking place, but we all know the value of the art is not reflected in the amount paid.

The arts may be good for cognitive development, but there is no relationship between value of a painting, play, dance or musical composition and test scores. The masterwork of a painter doesn’t raise test score higher than the preliminary sketches they made in preparation for the piece.

If Sharpe is correct that the currency of experience is art, I guess that validates John Dewey’s book, Art As Experience.

I don’t know that telling people the currency of experience is art will help people understand art better. People don’t necessarily associated the joy they experience playing with a newborn as being partitioned into units of art.

It is helpful to be reminded that many things are not valued solely in dollars, as much as it may seem that way. That we have recently seen that the amount of money thrown at an election doesn’t necessarily translate proportionally into victory seems to bear out Sharpe’s statement that votes are a distinct currency from money in the election economy.

Recently the big news has been about the Arts & Economic Prosperity 5 report. It is great that activity in the arts and culture industry has had such a strong impact in so many communities outside of the usual urban areas. But it is important to remember these numbers are just like a baseball score. They don’t tell us anything about the experience of the creators and participants, the quality of the work, or a handful of other things we might list as important before we even care about the amount of money that got exchanged.