Text commissioned for The Collaborative Arts Unit of the Arts Council of England for its CD-ROM publication ‘Ways of Working: Placing Artists in Business Contexts’ in 2002.
‘In ordinary culture... “order is tricked by an art” – in other words outsmarted – fooled.’1
The artist’s ascribed role is as developer of new cultural products, processes and norms. It is accepted that they occupy an avant garde position; they ‘test drive the future’. While this is limited in scope, it reflects artists’ ability to develop ad hoc, informal practices and to get things started. Successful business, however, is built on the consolidation and exploitation of that which is in development. This requires the erasure of the informal and the imposition of proper practices for the sake of efficient reproduction, management and therefore, profitability. This dominant culture works strategically to formalise everyday practices and to assert professionalism in their place. Artists occupy the privileged position of being able to represent everyday, informal practices in a range of contexts to ensure that the dominant managerial culture of business does not achieve absolute cultural hegemony.
There is an assumption that artists naturally operate only as developers of new cultural products, processes and norms, occupying a common-sensical avant gardist position of some kind. In the words of a recent European Union Information Society document, their role is to ‘test drive the future’, inferring that there is a future for everyone else in which artists no longer participate. Having done their job, they are obliged to move on and leave us all to it.
While a developmental role is limiting in scope, it reflects artists’ ability to develop informal practices, to get things done and to issue tactical strikes against dominant cultures. This is borne out when considering artists’ involvement with software development as an example of the way that ad hoc, everyday practices can be used to engage with and moderate professionalised business activities. For example, as a member of the artists’ software development group, i/o/d, I’d received no training in proper software development. All knowledge of the production had been garnered on an ad hoc basis; however, these informal methods provided everything that was necessary for survival in London’s cultural and new media industries in the late 90s. We came to realise that our approach could net us far greater impact than could any number of PhDs from the variously over-funded, overblown corporate R&D labs. Artists’ ‘street-smarts’ counted for more than citations or salary, every time.
Our way was never the proper way (it was informal, after all). To those schooled in more formal methods, our design, production, promotion and technical methods developed through an art practice could easily appear to be based only on assumption, conjecture or belief, rather than a solid, accountable, scientific body of knowledge. This was reinforced when I was asked to work in the Business Information Systems division of a business school.
All of the familiar ways of working and of operating in the world that had become everyday practices immediately looked out-of-place. At first, it appeared as though business computing couldn’t find a place for the new and the maverick. Over time, it was revealed to me that business computing, in fact business in general, knows exactly what everyday practices are and of its relationship to them. More importantly, it knows what a threat they can pose.
It is precisely the informality that is engendered by everyday practices that prove the threat to business. Business can only flourish from the moment when the personal takes flight along with the messy, chaotic, and unpredictable. Until a process has been formalised it cannot be reproduced without recourse to its originator. A product can therefore be held hostage by a single producer, reproducible only with their goodwill and co-operation; therefore, in order to exploit the product it is necessary to abstract it. The formalisation of software development led to it being considered an engineering discipline with Taylorist methods applied to its production. As (a consequence) workers, artists, inventors, ‘We have no sensuous relation with the objects we produce.’2
Successful business is built on the consolidation and exploitation of that which has been in development and requires the erasure of the informal and the imposition of proper practices for the sake of reproduction, management and profitability. Typically, business practices take advantage of the opportunities created by entrepreneurial activity in any field, including those equating to the common-sense notion of avant garde activity. However, the entrepreneur is not necessarily the financial beneficiary of the consolidation and exploitation of such an opportunity. Classically, it is the inventor who provides the model by which business learns to recognise where the real money is to be made. The inventor has to ‘learn to let go’ of an idea before being able to capitalise on it. Someone else takes care of business once the processes of abstraction and formalisation have occurred.
Formality is aspired to in Modernist cultures: whether as means of removing life from art, as described by Foster, or as a way of working through proletarianised production processes called for by Benjamin in The Author as Producer3. A cursory reading of historical avant garde art practices exemplify these tendencies, represented as an emphasis on formal, material qualities in conservative avant gardes and adoption of industrial processes in a number of radical avant garde practices since the early twentieth century.
Art is business if your practice aspires to the abstraction of messy, unpredictable, contingent elements. If they remain in play, the world continues in an excited state, in constant development. While this may provide the new or the novel – and initial entrepreneurial opportunities – business begins at the moment when development capitalised upon, traded for consolidation and exploitation. (All that is) Liquid turns to solid; predictability, manageability and profitability become possible. Warhol clearly defined ‘Business art’ as an enterprise separate from, but related to Art:
‘Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. After I did the thing called “art” or whatever it’s called, I went into business art. I wanted to be an Art Businessman or a Business Artist.’4
For Warhol, art was what happened when junkies and psychos invite themselves round. Business art was what happened when celebrity junkies and psychos invite you round. His Business Art portraiture was undertaken explicitly for money; nothing else enters the equation. For Warhol, ‘Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.’ Warhol had, of course, been through the hot wash of a ‘proper’ art career: The artist does development; gallerists, dealers, curators and critics do their best to subsequently consolidate and exploit by turns.
For business, art can also provide those things that are unattainable through analytical business-like approaches. The formalisation of processes necessarily removes any trace of human hand, yet at an operational level the human vigorously asserts itself. Human resource management is often called on to moderate the emotional dynamic of business: the day-to-day relationships between employees, bosses and unions or between consumers and products. It is here that there are examples of artists engaged to deal with the emotional aspects of operations, conducting role-playing exercises, helping employees to find ways of expressing themselves through poetry or in understanding consumers’ emotional attachment to branded goods.
Business also needs development - the nascent stage of a consolidated, exploitable commodity. For this, artists are adopted to conduct sponsored experimental work. So, for example, Simon Tegala’s ‘Anabiosis’, a telecoms-sponsored tracking of the artists' heart-rate, provides the public test-bed for a possible ubiquitous, invasive, commercial product. Artist Heath Bunting has also intimated that the more problematic and socially-sensitive aspects of Biotech trialed in recent artists’ work is, in effect, a means to soften up the public for increasingly malevolent commercial products.
Elsewhere in this collection of essays, there is evidence that from the artists’ point-of-view, working with business is a chance to be well- funded and secure for a while, providing much sought after stability and predictability: consolidation in effect. The artist is given the space, time and money to extend their practice into a new and receptive arena. In less interesting cases, this will be considered as simply an opportunity. In the words of the artist group BANK on finally calling it quits, ‘The corporate blanket is warm’5, and artists who accept it unconditionally should do so with full awareness of the consequences for their practice.
Some use the opportunity to work with business to extend their own range of expertise however. Carey Young with her Speakers’ Corner corporate communications presentation in 1999 demonstrated her mastery of managerial thinking, articulation and operation. This exemplifies Foster’s ‘lateral’ avant garde, ravenously consuming new ways of working to extend possible definitions of art practice. Young’s adoption of the practices of management culture is still good for business: conducting an appraisal of business training that apparently critiques the institution nonetheless replicates and perpetuates its dominant norms and values. The artist becomes business-person. In Young’s words, ‘They are assumed to be separate, but they’ve merged.’6
In The Return of the Real, Hal Foster pointedly alerts us to the misuse of anthropological method in the work of a number of socially-engaged artists of the 1980s as ‘an evasion’ of critique.7 However, it is precisely this sloppiness that can be advantageous to the artist. To those who operate within the professionalised framework of propriety and standardisation, to resort to informal and ad hoc methods is impossible. The two approaches cannot coexist. The professional exists only because of the desire to negate informality and impropriety. Artists however can misuse and abuse dominate culture practices, beyond research methodologies and software development. From this position, an artist can do anything; take any methodology, language, technique or process and twist it, break it...
Artists occupy the privileged position of being able to represent everyday, informal practices in a range of cultural and commercial contexts to ensure that the dominant managerial culture of business does not achieve absolute cultural hegemony. This kind of freedom of movement doesn’t happen anywhere else. It is literally your artistic license. Use it or lose it.
1. de Certeau M. et al. The Practice of Everyday Life Volume 2: Living & Cooking. University of Minnesota Press, 1998, p. xxiii
2. Slater, H. The Ass Between Two Chairs Break/Flow: January 2002
3. Benjamin W. Reflections, ed. Demits P. Harcourt Brace Janovich 1978, p.220-238
4. Warhol A. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and back again Harcourt, 1977. p. 92
5. Bank. Bank. Black Dog Publications, 2001, p. 1
6. Carey Young quoted in Weale S. System C.R.A.S.H! 1999. (http://www.irational.org/irational/media/crash.txt)
7 Foster H. The Return of the Real. MIT Press, 1996, p.196-197