Things that annoy me, volume 1,964

The other day I promised I would go through this and address its most irritating moments. I should stop making promises like this. They exhaust me.

Where to begin? How about at 35 seconds, where entrepreneur Steve Blank begins a riff on van Gogh's Starry Night, suggesting that when a painter sets out to make a picture s/he has "no idea what's going to come out". Let's put aside romantic ideas for a minute and just think about this...we'll assume that the painting Blank is talking about is the one in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, painted in June, 1889...thirteen months before van Gogh's death of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. It's also worth noting that by the time he painted this picture, van Gogh had been working on his craft for nine years. Van Gogh was an astonishingly prolific painter, and some 800 canvases (and many, many more drawings) in his short career. In that short decade, his work underwent considerable transformation from early, gloomy works like the 1885 Potato Eaters. Such changes came - if one trusts art historians (or, for that matter, the artists' own letters, instead of the myths one prefers to invent because they make things so much more interesting...) - after van Gogh started thinking about Seurat's use of color, about the nature of Japanese art and prints, and through exposure to the pictures and ideas of Paul Gaugin.

The point here is that van Gogh didn't just randomly toss canvases on his easel and hope for the best. as Blank implies. At this moment in his reverie, Blank is trying to make a point about how entrepreneurs are not like scientists (rational operators? people who can achieve predictable results under controlled circumstances???) but rather that they are like "artists...but a special breed of artists [...] composers"

Mixed metaphors (artists/composers...what's the diff?) notwithstanding, let's move to 1:16 in the tape, where Blank, with infuriating smugness, observes, "we've been teaching art for hundreds, probably thousands of years in our society [...] yet we still don't know what makes world class composers." Please, Steve, don't include yourself in that 'we.' I don't see any studio teaching in your resume. But, for the sake of argument, let's pretend for a moment that over those thousands of years, no one had identified any principles about harmony, about form, or about any other aesthetic properties that could be passed down from generation to generation so as to constitute a tradition. Let's imagine that every artists figured it out for herself or himself...that no one ever successfully offered advice or considered how another generation might approach an art form. Let's say, because if I get Blank's meaning, that knowledge of how art has been made in the past is of no use to an artist in the present because the circumstances have changed. Then what does it take to make a work of art (or, a successful business, because Blank is really talking about entrepreneurship, not art, about which he evidently knows little)?

Well, duh, it takes an appreciative audience.

The creative act is not formed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. ~Marcel Duchamp

But acknowledging that works of art come not from brilliant, inspired (or loony) individuals but from our collective interest in what brilliant, inspired (or even, occasionally, loony) individuals make would seriously undermine a motivational speech whose primary message is that it's who you are not what you do that matters. I mean, who cares what you do anyway? It certainly doesn't matter in the arts, where all you really need is a name that can become your brand...why should it matter in business?

Anyway...at about 1:50, Blank talks about the 'irony' of giving scientific tools to people who are artists (note that entrepreneurs are no longer like artists, they are artists...Barthes would have something to say about the way myth is being used here...but fortunately the reader doesn't get any harder than Malcolm Gladwell). Steve Blank, meet Stephen Wilson, and David Edwards. I am as excited as anyone about the possibility that artists in the 21st century can all hang up our velvet smocks and do something new and innovative and (gasp!) relevant outside of the museum/gallery universe, but that doesn't turn every creative act into a work of art, and it doesn't mean that everyone who create something is an artist.

What I really left Blank's short and grating talk with was a strong sense of the self-loathing that entrepreneurs must have. If I understand it correctly, it's necessary for people starting businesses to come up with some alternate universe in which what they do is more important than what it is - in which the design, manufacture, and marketing of a new widget is of the same cultural consequence as a symphony. How about letting things be what they are? Entrepreneurship requires vision, organizational skill, risk-tolerance, and a host of other traits (that are, coincidentally, valuable for artists to possess as well) but dressing it up as an expression of a culture's values and achievements - turning it into a work of art - is a recipe for making fun of art and commerce.