One of the challenges of connecting aesthetics and “beauty” to arts organizations is that aesthetics and reason work on different terms. We all know the “reasons” to do things as a cultural manager: To attain or optimize a stated goal of the enterprise; to get work made; to connect it with an audience; to do so efficiently, effectively, in ways that ensure future energy and attract future resources. These are not bad things. And they are useful and measurable reasons to move.
Flickr: Jason Rogers
Aesthetic intent, however, doesn’t tend to serve a third-party problem (except by accident). Aesthetics is about the coherence, integrity, and power of the work. I’m not claiming aesthetic work is “pure” and disinterested in its environment — work like that would never be completed or shared or experienced. But its focus is the immediate challenge of the work, itself.
For example, I recall a fabulously acerbic Mark Morris during a talkback after a performance of his dance company. An audience member asked him why, in a certain piece, the dancers had made a certain gesture with their hands. What was the meaning or the reference of that gesture, and how did it advance the intention of the work? He responded with a dry, cutting glare, saying something like “that was what the moment required.”
When I have explained my interest and effort to consider beauty, along with reason, in the design and direction of an arts organization, the first questions back have often been about utility. “Would you do that because the organization would be more effective in its work?” “Do you imagine that leaders with an eye toward beauty would make choices that were more naturally aligned with technical and moral goals?” “Would you do that because it might resonate more deeply with donors or audiences or artists, and lead to more loyalty and resources?”
Maybe. But mostly not. You would do it because that’s what the moment requires.
In a 2013 essay, James G. March (one of the world’s most prolific and respected scholars on organizations, management, and sociology) expressed his own preference for the beauty, rather than the immediate relevance, of ideas. He said:
Scholarship celebrates ideas, and in that celebration it honors beauty not only as an instrument of utility but also as a fundamental human aspiration.
I’m imagining arts organizations that embrace utility, of course, but also beauty or aesthetic elegance in the pursuit of their work. They do not “use” beauty to achieve or align their practical ends. Rather, they strive for beauty because they do, because it is a core element of who they are.
This idea may agitate many colleagues, who may see it as a return to self-regarding arts organizations that seek only to fund their own impulses and not to engage and serve the challenges of their communities (looking at you, Doug). I get that concern. But in a future post, I’ll explore why I believe the aesthetic impulse is not, necessarily, self-regarding.
In a favorite poem by Mark Strand, the poet reflects on his own motion through the world, and what compels him forward. I wonder if our collective actions in the arts, which we often call organizations, might hold similarly complex logics for what they do, and how they choose to do it. Strand concludes:
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
p.s. In this post, and in my evolving work, I am continuing to draw on the extraordinary effort and insight of Diane Ragsdale, and the authors and ideas she brings to my attention. Credit where credit is due!
Some ironies evolve. If arts administrators what to become artists (i.e. the creators of beauty,) then artists will need to become administrators. A case in point: Peter Gelb (who had no experience or credentials as an artist) massively increased the budget and expenditures of the Met in pursuit of his artistic vision. Financial shortfalls developed because his visions outpaced the money he could raise, so he demanded cuts in the artists’ pay. In their new contract, the orchestra thus demanded the right to participate in the company’s administration through the right inspect and approve its budgets.
If administrators pursue something so subjective as beauty, who will hold them to administrative realities?
So, you are suggesting that artists are not subject to any other realities but beauty? Not constraints of the human form, nor the limits of the physical world? Is it possible that all expressive endeavor is subject to multiple realities, many with competing demands?
Artists are, of course, subject to the realities of the world. The practical realities necessary for the realization of their visions, including necessary restraints, have traditionally been the realm of administrators. When an institution’s administrators assume the role of artistic visionaries, this division of labor and its inherent system of checks-and balances is weakened, with the result that the artists themselves must become involved with the organization’s practical realities. The inevitable result, as with my example about the Met, is a redistribution of power and function.
There are two ways of looking at this. The cynical view would be that it creates a lot of self-interested dilettantism. The more hopeful view is that it creates a more symbiotic and proactive relationship between administrators and artists – something that could be very positive.
This might even be a way that large organizations that have traditionally had a strong division of labor (management vs. artists) could function like smaller, often more creative arts organizations, whose members typically fill both roles (like, for example, a small theater company where the actors also do the organizational work.)
You also raise a much more complicated question by terming beauty and reason as so different that they represent “multiple realities.” I think this follows Western traditions that dichotomize body and mind. There seems to be an increasing view that this philosophy might be based on false assumptions about what humans are. In the last two decades, cognitive psychologists such as George Lakoff have argued that there is no Descartian person with a mind separate and independent of the body. Reason is not disembodied. Its very structure comes from the details of our embodiment. Philosophers such as John Dewey and Merleau-Ponty, also view the body as inseparable from reason, the primal basis that shapes everything we can mean, think, know, and communicate.
From this perspective, beauty and its inherent relationship to embodiment, and reason with its implications that it represents only the mind, might dissolve into a vision of a single holistic reality of what the human being is.
As our understanding of the holistic and inseparable unity of the body/mind and beauty/reason increases, we might begin to organize artistic expression in very different ways. With its many philosophic implications, you have grasped the horns of a beast that might be far bigger than you think…
Apple is an amazingly successful company because its products are the most beautiful, not the most utilitarian. How ironic that the integration of beauty into the work of an ARTS organization is a debatable idea.
At issue is not the beauty of the product, but the beauty of its means of production.