Anyone who took physics or wore a black turtleneck and smoked clove cigarettes will know about ‘entropy’ – the tendency of a system to descend into disorder, to lose working energy over time. Entropy is the reason hot things cool down, and the reason philosophy students are such downers at parties.
But lately I’ve been wondering if there might be an opposite tendency for complex human systems (like arts organizations, and arts ecologies) that’s equally deadening: a descent into order. Explosive, exploratory, innovative, and passionate groups begin an endeavor with a scramble for new approaches and an openness to new ideas. If successful in gathering resources and supporters, they often become rational, stable, process-focused, and risk-averse. They grow up. They calm down. They get organized, and spend more of their available time getting even more organized — in large part because their funders tell them to.
Howard S. Becker, in Art Worlds, describes this very tendency in some arts ecosystems. Says he:
The originally expressive art works and styles become increasingly more organized, constrained, and ritualized; organizational forms subordinate the artist increasingly to partially or entirely extraneous sources of control; and the world and its activities begin to resemble conventional craft worlds. In this sense, an art turns into a craft.
Becker doesn’t mean that ‘craft’ is a lesser form of human expression, only that it’s a different form with different rules, roles, and behaviors.
There are moments – admittedly, often just before I begin a new semester of teaching – when I wonder if the professional nonprofit arts ecology is trending this way (despite many examples of extraordinary, explosive efforts within it). I sense a growing emphasis on effectiveness and mechanics, and a descent away from dynamic and dramatic expression. And I wonder whether there’s another way to think and work.
In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton suggests three “great questions of philosophy,” which seem a good place to start (the words within parentheses are mine):
- “What can we know?” (which I’ll associate with ‘reason’ or ‘truth’)
- “What ought we to do?” (which I’ll associate with ‘ethics’ or ‘goodness’)
- “What do we find attractive?” (which I’ll associate with ‘aesthetics’ or ‘beauty’)
In the evolving field of ‘organizational aesthetics’ (yes, that’s a thing), scholars and practitioners wonder whether those three domains may also be applicable to business. As John Dobson frames the questions for business decisions:
- Is it profitable? (which I’d translate to ‘is it effective,’ among nonprofits)
- Is it ethical?
- Is it beautiful?
And while most management teams may blink at that final point, Dobson suggests that “when beauty is adequately defined, the third question becomes the most fundamental criterion of the three.”
Entropy, philosophy, aesthetics…what the hell am I getting at? I’m getting at this:
I see an opportunity to rethink how we think, act, and learn about collective action in expressive endeavor (or ‘the arts’ if you prefer). Order and reason and effectiveness are essential, of course. But that particular type of order can dissipate creative and expressive energy over time.
What if we countered the ‘descent into order’ not with disorder, but with MULTIPLE types of order: for a start, why not reason, ethics, and aesthetics…truth, goodness, and beauty? What if we approached the arts organization as an expressive endeavor in itself, as well as a tool to produce, present, and preserve expressive work? What would that look like? What attitudes and aptitudes would it require from its participants? And how might it change the game?
This Spring, I’m teaching a new class at American University that explores these very ideas — “The Art of the Arts Venture” — a combination of entrepreneurship and aesthetics that I hope inspires new connections and new insights among the students and myself. I’m inspired by Diane Ragsdale, and her experimental course at the Wisconsin School of Business (although her course had different goals than mine). Also inspired by her, I’ll work to share what I’m doing and learning along the way.
It may be time to bring beauty into organizational design, development, and management – especially in organizations whose very purpose is beauty. It’s certainly time to explore that idea.
SOURCES:
- Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
- Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990. (Thanks to Neill Archer Roan for this one.)
- Dobson, John. “Aesthetics as a Foundation for Business Activity.” Journal of Business Ethics 72, no. 1 (April 1, 2007): 41–46. (Thanks to Diane Ragsdale for this one.)
If you think philosophy students are downers at parties, you’ve been partying with the wrong philosophy students. (Damn that Schopenhauer!)
You should party with the folks at the Unemployed Philosophers Guild. They’re kind of a hoot.
School was never my strong suit. But this is one of the few times in 45 years I’m tempted by an academic offering! Sounds fascinating.
What if beauty is beauty because it cannot be defined? Point 3 and thus the whole approach falls apart.
I think of a recent book by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han entitled “Die Errettung des Schönen” (The Rescue of Beauty.) He addresses how beauty is everywhere, how it has become inflated. We now live under a cult of beauty. (Even business schools have embraced it…) Through this banalization, beauty has lost its transcendence and is surrounded by a suffocating and objectifying consumerism. Beauty’s ability to elevate or shock is reduced to a kind “culinary contentment” – similar to the “Like” ubiquitous on the Internet. The end result is a pornographization of beauty. Byung-Chul Han denounces every form of beauty that manifests itself Truth, disaster, or seduction. He rejects conceptions of beauty utilized to justify ethical and political systems. One thinks of worlds ranging from Nazi Gleichschaltung, to Social Realism, to the kitsch surrounding the Beloved Leader in North Korea. As American capitalism becames more and more totalizing, it also become an “aesthetic.” The worst is yet to come. OK corporations, subject me to your beauty……
For those who read German, info about Byung-Chul Han’s book is here:
http://www.fischerverlage.de/buch/die_errettung_des_schoenen/9783100024312
Yes, William. I share your concern about intermingling domains that have their own language and values…trying to describe one through the other. I’m not suggesting we USE beauty toward rational ends. We do that quite enough already in destructive ways. I’m also not suggesting we bend the language of reason to define beauty. Although, since we process the world through cognition, in large part, any effort to discuss a separate domain of ‘knowing’ will bump us into this problem.
Rather, I’m wondering whether there may be ways for aesthetic efforts, by groups of people, to approach what they do together, and how they do it, with an eye toward other things than reason. To do something together not because it strategically achieves some rational goal, but because it is just, or because it is beautiful to do it that way.
This requires that we name and navigate our now instinctive tendency to approach everything through reason and intellect — or through the pale cousins of reason and intellect we often use in business.
This is all a very rich and relatively unexplored field of thought. I hope you and Dianne will continue to pursue it. Part of its value is the thought and questioning it provokes that leads to new insights. You mention forms of social organization that operate “with an eye toward other things than reason.” This reveals, of course, the large common ground between conceptions of beauty and transcendence. On one hand we think of people from Michelangelo to Mahler. And on the other, the millions of people in history who died in religious wars. Or irrational political systems based on aesthetic conceptions of what society should be. What happens when we surrender rationality to aesthetic forms of cognition or “knowing”? How do we keep conceptions of beauty from turning into the horrors of hell?
So a central question must be answered. How do we place beauty within a rational system of checks and balances? Where do we place glorious beauty’s pale cousins of reason and intellect? If we use beauty as a system of social organization, how do we keep from losing our heads – and in more ways than one?
Anyway, thanks again to you and Dianne for these thought provoking blogs.
I would like to mention another book that seems relevant to this topic of making beauty a principle by which we live our lives: Richard Shusterman’s “Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art.” He discusses the cognitive and moral worth of art, and as the dust jacket explains, the aesthetic legitimacy of art (especially popular culture,) and the “ethical art of living beauty through the stylization of conduct and the aesthetic construction of the self.” More info here:
http://www.amazon.com/Pragmatist-Aesthetics-Living-Beauty-Rethinking/dp/0847697657
Through its pragmatic orientation to art, there seems to be something distinctly American about this philosophy.
Yes! Entropy and the 70’s,.. I was there and have had that philosophy at the back of my mind for …decades now. Thank you Andrew for your insightful article and the possible connection you propose to arts organizations. I think you are absolutely on to something here. I am pleased to work for an arts org that is very clearly not in the descent into order. And the structure is for-profit, a rare thing in the performing arts world other than Broadway. Is there something to be said for the freedom of earning your revenue and not being tied for your very life to a board? Very interesting theory indeed. Would love to take your class one day.