Category: business
Creativity and Business: Priceless
Creativity is inherently revolutionary. Business is inherently exploitative.Is creativity inherently anti-business?
These thoughts have been rolling around my mind like a marble in a sweet jar for some time now, as I ponder my own paths in creativity and in business.
Business requires predictability, results and judges by the balance sheet. It demands efficiency, proof and reports. Business exploits ideas for profit. Business people have a platform, a position, and a salary. Creatives on the other hand have a trajectory, a vocation and a journey. Creativity generates ideas, celebrates strangeness, and messes with your head. Business makes money, maintains the market and will sell you whatever you will buy. Creativity wastes time, disrupts the market, and even if you can own it, it’s probably worthless.
The art business is the most conflicted in the world.
Creative people alight upon something new and invest it with form and meaning, showing the way forward and lighting the path. Business people seek financial gain, and will gladly steal the patent for the lighting system.
Not being able to sell your idea means nothing to the truly creative person. Ignoring trends is essential if you are to follow the thread of your inspiration, wherever it might lead, even to your personal extinction – although that is not essential. Creativity reinvents itself just by continuing – change is its only constant. Creativity demands the pointless. Blind alleys are the stuff of life. Purpose is a necessary sacrifice along the path of enlightenment. The search for enlightenment is packaged and sold as weekend breaks in the picturesque Cotswolds, £400 per person including organic meals.
Thanks to television, radio and the internet, there is now little left of undivided attention, lingering examination, or even careful re-reading. All is subservient to the immediately useful, the entertaining or the alarmist. The timelines speed past like landscapes viewed from a train, remote, unvisited, unless robot search alert takes you back there. The windows of attention are shrinking as we stare more and more at screens, and less and less at the faces of individuals.
“Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” – T. S. Eliot
“Finding a businessman interested in the Arts is like finding chicken shit in your chicken salad” – Alice Neel