Donald Brinkman
I am pleased to have the opportunity to blog about art and its relationship to the corporate world — it is a topic of significant interest to me.
I make no claims at being an expert on some of the subjects I touch on in this short essay. I am sharing opinions gleaned from my personal experience. I welcome your comments and look forward to continuing the conversation.
Art and commercial products are often considered separately and are often even considered mutually exclusive. ‘Fine art’ is upheld as the antithesis of ‘crass commercialism’. I propose that this assumption fails under inspection.
Humans are aesthetic creatures and we rarely separate the aesthetic choices from our commercial choices. The forms of some of our most basic agricultural products and domesticated animals are quite literally shaped by generations of aesthetic decisions – farmers breed animal and vegetable species for attractive characteristics, pruning the genetic tree and imposing human aesthetic onto Darwinian processes.
Attractiveness itself is a Darwinian trait and at its most fundamental level it is difficult to untangle whether we are attracted to beauty or whether we find beautiful that which is attractive.
I would further suggest that art is the concretization of desire, the attempt to represent this ephemeral attractive quality in more concrete and permanent form. Consumer culture is centered around attraction and desire towards practical items. As such it is an extension of art into the fundamental transactions of human survival, without which art itself would be impossible.
Some modern art resists commercialism but historically this is not the case. While there has always been divine art that exists for its own sake, much of our great modern masterpieces were paid for through patronage and bought with wealth derived through mercantilism, imperialism, and sheer conquest. The works of art themselves became commercial objects.
In the modern world it seems we have made a scourge of this practice, placing greatest value on art that eschews being valued. There is an analogous situation in research where, if we look back to the origins of modern empirical thought, the connection between science and creativity is undeniable — many of the greatest scientists of the romantic era were also artists.
The chemist Humphrey Davy discovered chlorine and developed safety lamps that saved the lives of thousands of miners, all while writing a significant amount of poetry, some of it quite good.
William Herschel, the famous astronomer, was also a composer of great talent.
Members of the Royal Society, the foremost scientific society in England, helped to found the Royal Academy, England’s foremost artistic society. As time went on however a gulf began to grow between art and science.
Creative and empirical thought have come to be seen as impediments to each other… (Read Part 2 of Donald’s post here!)
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