Arts and Business

Building a Common Ground for Understanding Society

Elena Raviola, Peter Zackariasson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317500025
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Arts and Business aims at bringing arts and business scholars together in a dialogue about a number of key topics that today form different understandings in the two disciplines. Arts and business are, many times, positioned as opposites. Where one is providing symbolic and aesthetic immersion, the other is creating goods for a market and markets for a good. They often deal and struggle with the same issues, framing it differently and finding different solutions.

This book has the potential of offering both critical theoretical and empirical understanding of these subjects and guiding further exploration and research into this field. Although this dichotomy has a well-documented existence, it is reconstructed through the writing-out of business in art and vice versa.

This edited volume distinguishes itself from other writings aimed at closing the gap between art and business, as it does not have a firm standpoint in one of these fields, but treating them as symmetrical and equal. The belief that by giving art and business an equal weight, the editors also create the opportunity to communicate to a wider audience and construct a path forward for art and business to coexist.

Section IV

Leadership and Power

The fourth section of the book deals with concepts such as leadership and power. It includes four chapters, three of which are conceptual dialogues, and one is based on the authors’ experience of founding and participating in an artists’ collective.

The management scholar Katja Lindqvist takes the reader on a historical journey, focused this time on leadership, a central and highly debated issue in organization and management studies. She addresses how leadership has been understood and practiced in the arts and in business. First, she reviews what leadership is in Art History and comes to the remark that leadership might be called style in the arts. Then, she reviews the literature from business administration and points at a shift from focusing on personal traits to focusing on mundane tasks of the leaders. She then turns to the fields of Sociology of Art and Entrepreneurship in order to discover some common discourses on leadership between the two fields.

The second chapter by the arts scholar Kerry McCall and the organization scholar Maeve Houlihan continues the discussion of Lindqvist by focusing on the issue of entrepreneurship. Departing from the observation of the arts and business being separate, yet increasingly blending worlds (see also Schnugg and Vesna in this volume), they raise the question of the artist as cultural entrepreneur. Building on the history of entrepreneurship as a field, they problematize the invasion of the entrepreneurial language into the cultural spheres with respect to issues such as values (see also the section on performing values), creativity, innovation and risk.

The third chapter by business scholar Yuliya Shymko and arts and business scholar Alison Minkus focuses on the question of power in organizations and thus continues a discussion raised in several previous chapters (see Lindqvist in this section, but also the chapters in collaboration in section 2). Like in Lindqvist’s and Schnugg and Vesna’s chapters, the historical journey of Yuliya Shymko and Alison Minkus bring them to highlight common roots of their view rather than to distance their perspectives. Giving voice to wise old men, such as Max Weber, George Simmel and Anthony Giddens, the two female authors engage in an open discussion around bureaucracy, business organizations and the arts.

The third chapter is written by organizational scholar Elen Riot, in dialogue with cultural manager Pauline Quantin, and is based on Riot’s experience as an artist-in-residence at the artistic wasteland La Fileuse, founded by Pauline in Reims, France. Riot’s journey is about tracing the memories of the ex-textile factory La Fileuse and its recent development with the artists’ occupation. This journey raises a number of issues common to other chapters in this book, like the valuation of the organizing practices (see Reinhold and Sanaâ), the establishment of a balance between individual and collective in the collaboration (see Hansen and Strauss), the relationship between art and society (see Barinaga). We have, however, chosen to lift up here the question of leadership and relate it to both Lindqvist’s and McCall and Houlihan’s reflections on leadership and entrepreneurship. In this somewhat intimate dialogue, the leader Pauline Quantin and the follower Elen Riot, who both happen to cross the worlds of art and business fluidly, reflect on the very process of building an artists’ collective.

11 Leadership in Art and Business

Katja Lindqvist

Introduction

Leadership is prized both in the world of art and the world of business. But does leadership really refer to the same notion in the two contexts? Is it at all possible to discuss leadership in art and business and find a common ground? This question will be explored in this chapter through a closer look at how leadership is perceived in Art History and Business Studies (Business Administration), but also in Sociology of Art and the growing research area of Entrepreneurship. The specialization of disciplines significantly conditions the framework of research undertaken in diverse disciplines and has a substantial impact on the understanding of leadership in art and business. When discussing leadership in art and business, it is therefore important to recognize the differences in norms and practice in these practice fields as well as in the respective academic fields. Leadership can in general term be described as the function of organizing joint efforts for a specified purpose. In this sense, leadership refers to the function of combining resources and coordinating action towards specific goals, achieving compliance for decisions among contributors to the organized efforts. This chapter will not discuss the possible benefits of artistic expressions for management or leadership practice, nor will it discuss the practice of leadership in the art world, as these are beyond the scope of the chapter.

Leadership in the History of Art:¹Style and Innovation

Leadership in art, at least from an Art History perspective, is defined in terms of style. Art History ² as academic discipline consists to a large extent of analyses of changes in the style of artworks and artistic forms of expression. Leadership as a topic enters Art History through artist biographies. Vasari (1991) set the tone with his Lives of the Artists, where the context in which particular artworks were created gives relief to studies of the artworks themselves and also binds different artworks together in a chronological and stylistic development of the artist’s oevre.

Art History developed as discipline parallel to the formation of History as discipline and strived for scholarly rigour, although with differences between individual researchers (Karlholm, 1996). In this process, leading researchers, in particular Wölfflin, aimed to distinguish Art History from Cultural History, its mother discipline. It is at this point in time, at the end of the 19th century, that style becomes the basis for much of modern art history as discipline, and scholars develop the theoretical basis of Art History. As a result, other aspects of artistic practice became of less interest. Art theory has continued to be an important part of Art History as a discipline, in particular referring to aesthetics and philosophy, together with frameworks borrowed from Psychology in later decades (Danto, 1981; Pointon, 1994).

The orientation of Art History towards style has implications for how artistic leadership is understood. Regardless of the development of the role of the professional artist, style becomes the foremost element around which to construct the history of art. Due to the development of Art History as a discipline, leadership in art is largely defined as technical mastery and innovation driving the field (market). In other words, leadership in art, at least from an Art History perspective, is defined as originality of style (of artworks), in the sense of being ahead of others in developing new styles of expression. This idea is expressed by the term ‘the avant-garde’ as coined by 20th-century art critics (Krauss, 1985; Calinescu, 1987). This in turn was a development that was a result of the decline of the art academy system, which had offered the art audience a minimum of a common ground for the interpretation and judgement of artworks (Goldstein, 1996). The idea of the avant-garde comprises some artists being ‘ahead’ of other people, expressing new sensibilities before they are recognized in other areas of society through style innovations expressed by one or a few artists later spreading to others, and has shaped the idea of artistic (stylistic) leadership.

In Art History, artistic mastery generates authority, since this is what renders influence and reputation. This means that masters in visual art are visionaries with a strong stylistic talent and the ability to materialize visions and ideas. Due to this mastery, they tend to become leaders of artistic ventures where other contributors (assistants as well as external parties) are involved due to demand from an audience with educated tastes. In order to realize the artistic vision, the master needs to control and coordinate the realization of the artistic vision. In general, the recognition of the mastery (skill) of the individual artist is the reason for invitations to commissioned work or collaborations, and therefore, this skill is also the basis for negotiations of terms of work. This is in particular illustrated by the description of the rapid and radical development in art during the second half of the 19th century and the turn of the century 1800/1900, with painters such as Cézanne, Monet, Picasso and others who were defined increasingly as leading artists due to their stylistic innovation.

The Artist as a Leader: A Changing Role

The nature of artistic work has developed substantially over the last centuries. A significant aspect of the development of artists as leaders is the organizational downscaling of the artist enterprise from workshop master to individual entrepreneur. There are historical studies of this development, but most descriptions of it have been undertaken in Sociology of Art rather than in Art History (Alpers, 1988; Jensen, 1994; Bourdieu, 1996). Even contemporary developments in the organization of the art world tend to be left to sociologists to describe. The artist role changed when the workshop system with masters and apprentices disappeared and was replaced by art academies controlling the quality of artist training and of the art produced. This development took place first in Italy and later in France in the mid-17th century and then later in other northern European countries. Academies taught what was considered the best of artistic style (Denis and Trodd, 2000). This generated opposition among artists in the 19th century, when more artists started to question the need to paint within a tradition and especially the idealism of academic art. This development coincided with reactions to Enlightenment that had emphasized rationality and resulted in Romanticism, with its emphasis on emotions and with a distinct individualistic approach. Nature, perceived as untamed and original, took on a role as the antidote to historical and idealistic painting. Artistic work should be based on natural forces rather than formed by antiquated norms. This led to an increasing individualism among artists, who at this point increasingly sought an individual style, and the broadening of the art market and the lesser influence of academies of art led to a greater emphasis on style as the individual trademark of artists. This was the point in time where the artist as a genius myth was formed (Wittkower and Wittkower, 1963; Emison, 2004).

With the deterioration of ‘general’ rules for painting through the decreasing role of art academies, art viewers could no longer rely on their general knowledge of classical styles and motives, and a large part of the audience could no longer interpret new styles based on a general canon. This is where the role of the art critic becomes increasingly important in the art field. By the mid-19th century, style was already a distinguishing mark for different groups of artists, such as the Realists, the Impressionists et cetera. At this point in time, art galleries had taken on the role of managers of artistic production, leaving the artist to focus on stylistic innovation and refinement. After the disastrous experiments in the early 20th century with governments dictating acceptable styles for art (in Russia, Germany and Italy), the political and societal support of art took on a more distanced role, with artists being able to receive public support regardless of artistic style. This made artists into state-funded professionals outside most other spheres of society than the art world. With innovation at the core of artistic value, artists tested the limits for public support, something leading to discussions of artist ethics and the purpose of public support of art. This development has led to what Bourdieu (1985) has described as the division of the art field in two, the field of restricted production and the field of large-scale production. The first more or less corresponds with publicly supported art production and display, whereas the second corresponds with the commercial market for art.

With the changing character of artistic work at the end of the 20th century, some artists have developed new kinds of organizations, where leadership can once again be said to be a relevant aspect of artistic work. With the increasing relational orientation of (some) art practice, aspects of leadership have become more prevalent in the art field, both in terms of organizational aspects of the artist’s relation to her or his public, but also in relation to contributors to the realization of artworks. The studio of Olafur Eliasson is an example of this new development of the artist’s workshop, not dissimilar to that of former times, but with a new theoretical framework (Jacob and Grabner, 2010; Coles, 2012). The artist role has also developed towards that of a researcher, both metaphorically and literally, with the development of reproductive techniques, where the artist can become more of a project leader for different kinds of investigations or productions even performed by others (Lacy, 1995; Sullivan, 2005). In this sense, the artist is today a leader in a more intellectual sense, resembling a modern designer more than an artisan. Leadership in this context can therefore mean rather different things depending on the type of activity artists are engaged in. What has remained is the reluctance of artists to discuss strategies and management, something which is in line with Bourdieu’s description of the restricted field of the production of symbolic goods. Speaking of leadership and management, at least in Europe, is still downplayed in the art field, unless explicitly linked to artistic goals and purposes. Leadership in art is a practice, but not a practice that is discussed professionally. In this sense, it contrasts with practice in business, where leadership practice is of central concern.

Leadership in Business Studies: From Personal Aptness to a Mundane Task

In business practice, the issue of leadership has been central since the rapid development of industrial markets and capitalism in the last two centuries (Chandler, 1984). The birth of the limited company emphasized this focus, as businesses stepped out of families, and the manager became a specific and central position in business organizations (Barnard, 1938). It’s not possible to summarize the development of leadership research, but what can in this context be emphasized is that leadership research has historically focused on personal traits and skills of successful leaders of businesses, but increasingly the context of leaders, and the situation and environment, as well as the function of leaders, have become more central in leadership research. Leadership today is largely perceived as relational today within research.

Barnard (1938), author of one of the classical texts on leadership and management, pointed out that a central role of the executive is to ensure cooperation. Decisions on cooperation need to be authoritative in order to be effective, and therefore the issue of authority is central to leadership and management. Authority of decision-making has been investigated by organizational sociologists, in particular Weber and Fayol. Weber described three ideal types of authority in society: legal, traditional and charismatic (Weber, 1968a). But Weber’s three ideal types of authority do not really leave space for the market and business leaders when it comes to authority. Legal authority is what characterizes bureaucracies, traditional authority characterized premodern societies and organizations and finally, charismatic authority is based on devotion and the norms conveyed by an individual. If the bureaucratic organization functions well as such, there is hardly any space for leaders, as actions are based on efficiency and value-rationality. In business studies as well as in business practice, there has, however, been an apparent demand for an understanding of the role of leaders and managers in organizations, to judge by the amount of publications in the area of leadership. An interest in individually based authority given the limiting framework for leadership given by the other two Weberian ideal types of authority is perhaps not surprising. In fact, descriptions of business leadership as an art abound (Grint, 2001; Ibbotson, 2008; Taylor, 2012). Perhaps due to bourgeois education, business leaders in the last century have to a certain extent been acquainted with cultural classics and sometimes even with newer developments in art. This might be the reason for the analogies made between artists as leaders and business leaders as creating metaphorical artworks and leadership as artistry in the Romantic sense of talent. This understanding of the notion of art corresponds with a view of the artist as a genius (Wittkower and Wittkower, 1963; Emison, 2004). In recent years, leadership studies have been undertaken in collective artistic contexts such as music, film and performing arts (Gylle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Images
• Introduction
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Section I The Arts and Business: Contemporary and Historical Dialogues
• Section II Organizing Collaboration
• Section III Performing and Agreeing on Values
• Section IV Leadership and Power
• Section V Learning, Knowledge and Thinking
• Index