The business of creativity

"When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money." So said Oscar Wilde, over a century ago- but has anything changed? I would agree with the second part of his observation; artists certainly do talk about money, or more accurately, the lack of it, the attempt to get hold of it and its rapid disappearance.
 

Not being party to bankers’ get-togethers, I can’t vouch for whether art is a popular topic of conversation with them. However, it seems that economists, business people and CEOs are very interested in something related to art: creativity.

Innovation and creativity in business books
A quick perusal of the business best-seller lists shows that creativity, and its close cousin, innovation, have been hot topics for years. Michael Michalko has written extensively on how to increase the innovative solutions that creative-thinking strategies can generate 'with precise instructions on how to apply them to the business world and beyond’ (from his book Cracking Creativity).

Creativity in Business, by Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers, claims that ‘you can live your life as a work of art’ through creativity-  a wonderful prospect with echoes of Nietzsche’s idea that ‘we want to be the poets of our lives’.

Why creativity?
Creativity- including lateral thinking, unusual solutions and more playful, experimental approaches- is seen as something that both individual employees and the corporation as a whole should aspire to. Creativity is believed to kick-start innovation, which is undoubtedly an engine of economic growth in a world already with over-saturated with products and services.

Artists as ideal workers

Artists are generally believed have abundant quantities of creativity; its part of the job description. Not only do they create original artworks but also, as freelancers with no state support or job security, they are obliged to think and work flexibly and innovatively in order to survive. This paradoxically makes them the ideal workers in a neo-liberal economy that tends towards ever more precarious labour conditions in the service of profit margins; oversimplifying to make a point, the more rights and job security workers have, the less profitable businesses are.

Creativity in capitalism
This trend has been studied in depth by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism, which studies management literature between 60s and now. Amongst other things, they argue that creativity, self-fulfillment and authenticity- attributes often associated with artists- were co-opted out of the May ‘68 anti-establishment protests and into the new capitalist model, epitomised by the dressed-down ‘cool capitalists’ like Bill Gates and Ben & Jerry.
 

Mixing business and pleasure
But also, the artist could be seen as the ideal subject of ‘network capitalism’, displaying labour flexibility and adaptability alongside a willingness to exploit non-economic aspects of their lives like emotions, social relations and personality. This can be observed in the merging of business and pleasure which is so common in artistic circles; many artists willingly socialise with people who could also (directly or indirectly) lead to their next job, show, commission and so on.

Businesslike artists
Meanwhile artists are also encouraged, both at university and through trade publications like a-n (The Artists Information Company) and Artquest, to become more ‘professional’ in order to survive. Artquest, for example, has very useful advice on setting up in business, getting a decent accountant and building the all-important mailing list.

At the very least artists are expected to have business cards and a website, and also increasingly an extensive ‘on-line presence’ incorporating  Twitter, Facebook, and even better, a personal blog. Maintaining all of these communicative platforms is a business all by itself, which inevitably cuts in to ‘real’ work time.

This means that even artists whose work does not conceptually address or else directly critiques money, value and commerce, must be businesslike in order to survive. Perhaps we could update Wilde’s quote to say that when businessmen get together, they talk about creativity; when artists get together, they talk about business.