Michael Gold

Teaching Artistry Opens a New Space for Art & Business Education

Posted by Michael Gold, Nov 14, 2011 0 comments


Michael Gold

Michael Gold

Michael Gold

Integrating the arts with business fundamentally questions the siloed position of the arts as a cultural function that takes place outside the mainstream of everyday life.

This opens a new “space” that challenges us to integrate our collective artistic intelligence in new ways. But it’s also an ancient space for there have always been cultures that have not distinguished between the experience of the arts and that of other types of social interaction.

The fact that the arts “have relied on patrons for thousands of years” points to the source of an enduring cultural and spiritual ennui that has gone unquestioned in the social fabric of western culture for far too long.

The arts are a gift of human nature that holds the source of insight into the depth and nuance of “being” together in the world. It is ironic that existential changes in the world of business bring us to this realization about the value of the arts. But perhaps business is, itself, every bit an art form as any other form of artistic expression?

Artists who are able to develop language skills that transcend the traditional boundaries between the world of art and business foster the development of a completely new learning platform -- a place to discover underlying creative competencies common to all collaborative endeavors. In so doing they pioneer a new functional role for the arts.

This crossover actually began 30 years ago with the advent of “teaching artistry.”

Simply put, teaching artistry is the capacity to convey one’s artistic skills and insight into another’s process (in a different field) in order to generate a deeper understanding and appreciation for nuance and complexity.

For example, the jazz ensemble is a high performance team capable of sustaining collaborative innovation with a minimal yet “tangible” set of guidelines and roles. Using a jazz ensemble is a highly effective way help high performance teams in business perceive, define, and manage the “intangible” values of trust, capacity to take risks, cross- functional sensitivity, listening, and the ability to experience error as the essential means for learning to improve process. (See more on this at jazz-impact.com)

The key in teaching artistry is to engage people in the experience (of jazz in this case) as observer and then, in carefully crafted ways, as participant. The skill of teaching artistry lies in the capacity to facilitate conversations that translate and integrate those shared experiences across ideological boundaries between business and the arts.

Eric Booth, one of the leading pioneers of this field wrote a revealing essay entitled The History of Teaching Artistry: Where we come from, are, and are heading. He offers an ambivalent description of teaching artistry that provides a clue to the challenges we face as artist practitioners:

“Part of the challenge of defining the role is its essential hybridity—it is neither one role nor the other, but intentionally both. In an economy of specific job titles, traditional silos, and government employment coding, this makes teaching artistry inconvenient to categorize, until the world catches up to recognize the new category.”

As challenging as it is, the hybrid nature of teaching artistry opens a new space in both the fields of arts education and business education. If we’re able to establish a shared language between disciplines we can at once expand the sphere of arts participation and enhance the capacity to manage creativity within business cultures.

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