Creativity and Business: Priceless
Is creativity inherently anti-business?
Creativity is inherently revolutionary. Business is inherently exploitative.
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 commerce.
Business judges success by the balance sheet, requires predictability and results. It demands efficiency, asset ownership, and positive market reports. Business exploits ideas for profit. Business people have a platform, a position, and a handsome salary. Creatives on the other hand have a trajectory, a vocation and a journey. Creativity makes ideas, celebrates strangeness, doesn’t always know where it’s going, shocks and messes with your head.
Creatives just about pay the rent. Business takes ideas, makes money, offers comfort, generates and maintains the market, will sell whatever you will buy. Creativity wastes time, disrupts the market, and even if you can own it, if you made it, it's probably worthless.
The art business is the most conflicted business 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. You aim to sell your art, your thoughts only if you’ve written them down, or made them into objects. 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 creative enlightenment is packaged and sold as weekend art breaks in the picturesque Cotswolds, £950 per person including organic meals, spinal adjustments, cosmic backrubs, paint, and canvas.
Do you like it? Do you know what it is? Do you care?
This is not about the art business.
Thanks to radio, television and the internet in that order, there is now little left of our undivided attention, lingering examination, or even careful re-reading. All is subservient to the immediately useful, the entertaining and 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 shrink as we stare more and more at screens, and less and less at the faces of living individuals. And none of it is new - all this arrived before the 21st Century.
Now it sits unchanging, despite what it it tells us. How much does originality cost these days? Stay by the fire, watch the flames. They always have something to say.
"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