Art

Schumpeter recently wrote in The Economist about how business should learn from the arts. Studying the arts he wrote, might help businesses be more innovative and more resilient to failure. A few days after the article was published, Christian Dior fired John Galliano its 50-year-old chief designer, for allegedly making anti-Semitic remarks to a couple in a bar (John Gapper later took a great shot at describing how volatile talent needs to be coupled up with business skill).

Modern art dwells in a constant switch between transgression and frivolity. It is the transgression, or more specifically the innovative produce of boundary-breaking what attracts Companies.

Unlike in business, art needs a belief system: museums and other art institutions (now including social-network-tsunamis) do to artists what central banks do to paper: they give them value. Once they have that value stamp and until they cross the line, artists are tolerated and loved for their excesses. And the art machinery leans on them.

Businesses should not require that belief system to innovate. They should create even with anonymous contributors, never needing to put up with the frivolous excesses of a few capricious creators.

Executives are enough to deal with.