In a week I will be heading to Madison, Wisconsin to teach a 12-week course in beauty for undergraduate business majors. The course is aimed at helping students cultivate an aesthetic sensibility. It will combine a bit of philosophizing on the nature and function of beauty in today’s society; arts and other aesthetic experiences; and the documentation of these experiences in a portfolio. Over the next four months I will use Jumper as a platform from which to open up the class. I want to share what we’re doing and learn from others who may be walking down similar or parallel paths. In this first post I thought I’d discuss where the concept for the class came from and how it has evolved, and share a couple sections of the course guide to give a sense of its thrust.
From a course for Arts MBA Students to a course for Undergraduate Business Majors
In 2013, Sherry Wagner-Henry, Director of the Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) asked if I would be interested to come to the Center for a semester as a visiting guest artist/lecturer. For those who don’t know, the Bolz Center offers one of the few Arts MBA degrees in the US, alongside its MBA degree. Students in the program take the required courses for an MBA, plus a range of arts-related courses. I was thrilled by the invitation and we agreed to put together a proposal. In support of that proposal Sherry asked me to think about a course I would like to teach.
At the time, I imagined I would be teaching the Arts MBA students. We set up a time to talk by phone so that I could bounce my ideas off her. I started by explaining that I have always been a bit critical of arts administration programs because they seem to be almost exclusively focused on developing the business skills of their students and rarely, if ever, focused on simultaneously developing their students’ aesthetic sensibilities. Skills in the latter seem to be taken for granted in many arts admin programs (though I would argue that they shouldn’t be). I remarked that if I ever ran such a program I would probably encourage the students to attend performances and exhibitions on a weekly basis and ask them to write a 3,000-word essay on their tastes in art as one of their graduation requirements.
I then rambled on about three other points of inspiration. (1) One of the questions I have been circling around for the past 5-6 years is How can the arts matter to more people and matter more to people? I am curious about how people develop their aesthetics and tastes and what arts organizations can do to encourage this growth. (2) Like many others, I see time at university as a prime (and in many cases last) opportunity for exploring a variety of arts and cultural experiences and, thereby, learning about oneself, one’s aesthetic, various art forms, and the culture generally. (3) I mentioned that I had seen Howard Gardner speak at MOMA a few years back on his True, Beautiful, and Good series and how compelled I was by the talk I had heard on The Good and, in particular, his concept of Good Work (i.e., work that is Excellent, Ethical, and Engaging).
I ended by saying that I somehow wanted to combine these various ideas into a course.
It turns out Gardner’s 2011 book (Truth, Goodness, and Beauty Reframed) was on Sherry’s bookshelf and that she and a couple colleagues in the business school had been thinking on and off (at the encouragement of the Dean of the Business School) about the virtue of beauty and how it might be incorporated into the curriculum. We started talking about Gardner’s concept of the beauty portfolio.*
Gardner re-defines beauty (for the 21st century) as the property of experiences and asserts that “to be deemed beautiful an experience must exhibit three characteristics. It must be interesting enough to behold, it must have a form that is memorable, and it must invite revisiting.”[1] Gardner suggests that two educational implications follow from this assertion: (1) students should be encouraged to keep a portfolio of their experiences of beauty, aimed at tracing how those experiences have evolved over time; and (2) students should be encouraged to reflect upon the palpable reasons, or factors, that have lead them to consider one experience to be beautiful and another not.[2]
The more we talked the more I realized that the very course I was imagining could be anchored in Gardner’s idea of a Beauty Portfolio and I blurted out, “I want to create that course—a course on beauty!” And as we continued talking, it became clear that the beauty course we were envisioning should be aimed at a broader population of business school students (rather than at the narrow cohort of Arts MBA students).
I hung up the phone and knew immediately who I needed as my co-conspirator—Polly Carl, who has been thinking and writing about beauty for years. See, for example, here and also here. We had lunch in NYC and I shared what I was thinking and she jumped in and immediately rattled off a few texts for me to read and we created a napkin sketch of the bones of a course. (I’m incredibly enthused that Polly will be coming out to Madison to give three critical lectures over the course of the term.)
As soon as it was clear that this course was to be a reality I began wading into academic literature examining the links between beauty/aesthetics and leadership/business management, as well as artistic and philosophical reflections on beauty. I needed to be able to answer one question for myself, and others.
Why teach beauty in a business school?
In an effort to articulate the worth of the course I began writing a literature review/essay aimed at answering this exact question, which I’ll share in my next post.
In the meantime, I leave you with an excerpt from the syllabus. I hope if you are at all interested in this experiment you will share your ideas, questions, or criticisms—or reach out if you’d like to think about ways to partner or collaborate.
Approaching Beauty – Course Overview (excerpt)
Approaching Beauty (a/k/a aesthetics and business) aims to give business students the tools and encouragement to cultivate an aesthetic sensibility. This is neither an arts appreciation course nor a philosophy course. This is a practical course that takes as a foundational precept that art is integrally linked to the experience of things and of life itself.[3] It will combine discussions on the nature and function of beauty in today’s society (led by a range of scholars and artists); curated and self-directed aesthetic experiences; and the documentation of these experiences in a portfolio. Though Gardner is not specific about the form of such a portfolio, for the purposes of this class we are conceptualizing it as a multimedia (visual, auditory, and written) catalogue. Students will ask and answer (in their portfolios) in relationship to a variety of provocations and experiences a range of questions, including: Is it beautiful? Is it not beautiful? Why? On what basis am I forming this judgment? Students will also share their portfolio entries with each other and reflect upon where their ideas about beauty converge and diverge, and why.
Portfolio assignments will be aimed at giving students “bigger-than-me experiences”—to use the phrase coined by Sociologist Steven J. Tepper in a recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Tepper (2014) asserts that we are living in a period in which institutions of learning need to provide courses that help students “realize that authentic growth comes as much from escaping as from discovering the self.”[4] Tepper makes a link between the rise in cultural activity focused on personal expression (what he calls me experiences) and several studies that indicate that empathy, compassion, moral reasoning and tolerance may be declining; ultimately, he makes a case that what is needed (both in the culture-at-large and at universities) is fewer me experiences and more bigger-than-me experiences. He distinguishes the two, writing:
“Me experiences” are different from “bigger-than-me experiences.” Me experiences are about voice; they help students express themselves. The underlying question they begin with is, “What do I have to say?” BTM experiences are about insight; they start with, “What don’t I know?” Voice comes after reflection. Me experiences are about jumping into a project and making something—an idea, an artifact, a piece of media. BTM focuses on John Dewey’s notion of “undergoing”—making something happen in the world, which requires, first, a shift in our own subjectivity. We must anticipate problems, struggle with ideas, seek some resolution. It’s a process.
Fundamental assumptions of this class are that art teaches us to see what me might otherwise (choose to) not see; art confronts or holds together things that are inherently in tension, it embodies paradox and ambivalence, and it resists easy resolution; and the beautiful (in art and life) arises out of struggle.
Because it is being offered through a business school, this iteration of the course is designed to bridge the inspirational/aesthetic and economic/business worldviews. It starts from a first principle that there is great value (for future business managers/leaders, in particular) in having the capacity to approach the world, or respond to it, aesthetically.
Scholar of corporate finance, business economics, and economic philosophy John Dobson (2007) argues that we are living in an aesthetics business era in which corporations increasingly need to recognize the importance of such things as “harmony, balance, sustainability, aesthetic excellence, judgment, context, compassion, community, beauty, and art.”[5] Dobson suggests that aesthetic judgment is needed in business leaders, in particular, because they face the continual challenge of distinguishing between excellence and its material by-product, material wealth.[6]
Likewise, scholar of management and corporate responsibility, Sandra Waddock (2010) asserts that there are four leadership capacities that can be developed through the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility (what she also characterizes as “better seeing”):
- An intuitive grasp of the non-rational or observable elements of situations and decisions;
- Creativity in imagining solutions or future action;
- Understanding of relationships among elements in a system in a ‘design’ sense; and
- The capacity for balancing conflicting elements with the greater good in mind.[7]
And in a similar vein, organizational behavior scholar Nancy Adler (2011) proposes that both “great leaders and great artists” demonstrate courage in three ways: (1) the fortitude and capacity to “see reality as it is”; (2) the daring to imagine new (beautiful) possibilities; and (3) the conviction to inspire others to shift their sights from current reality to imagining what’s possible.[8]
While there is a wide range of literature that has informed the development of this course (laid out in the aforementioned literature review/essay that will be shared in a future post), it builds in particular on Gardner’s construct of the Beauty Portfolio; Tepper’s concept of “bigger-than-me experiences,” Waddock’s premise that aesthetic experiences can help leaders cultivate a different way of “seeing,” and Adler’s vision of “a leadership based more on hope, aspiration, innovation and beauty than on replication of historical patterns of constrained pragmatism.”[9] It also takes as premise (following Dobson 2007) that aesthetic judgment is a critical skill for 21st century business managers and that there is a link between aesthetics, ethics, economics, and quality of life.
***
What do you think about approaching beauty in a business school?
* I’m quite pleased that Howard Gardner knows about our course and is enthused we are developing it.
[1] Gardner 2011, p. xi.
[2] Ibid, p. xii.
[3] Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. New York: Penguin Group/Berkeley Publishing
[4] Tepper, S. (2014). Thinking ‘Bigger Than Me’ in the Liberal Arts. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/15/2014. Available at http://chronicle.com/article/Thinking-Bigger-Than-Me-in/148739/.
[5] Dobson 2007, p. 46.
[6] Ibid, p. 45.
[7] Waddock 2014, p. 140.
[8] Adler 2011, p. 210
[9] Ibid, p. 208
Of course, the only thing worse for the arts than an administrator who thinks beauty can be defined is one who has defined it. This might seem obvious, but I think one of the biggest failings of arts administration over the last couple decades has been reductive thought.
The solutions to most of our problems are actually subversive. The fixes are not in the box. It is thus difficult to develop a career as an arts administrator while truly examining the most challenging problems we face. Arts administrators must adapt themselves to a pervasive system of cultural plutocracy with the very limited sphere of action that implies. Their search for answers thus all too often comes across as impossibly confined and deeply ironic.
We could teach corporations to control their actions with aesthetic concepts about as easily as we could teach a shark or hyena to appreciate the slow food movement. Profit, and the unmitigated freedom to create it, and as fast as possible, is what matters in a corporation. Here again we see the simplistic and pat thinking of arts administrators, and how they rationalize their limited field of freedom. They are not allowed to rock the boat. The Rockefellers will always tear down the Diego Rivera murals.
People forget how extremely dangerous concepts of beauty are. Art formulates the metaphors we live by. Most of the great social catastrophes of human history were created by political and economic leaders who aspired to define and establish beauty within their societies. The three great monolithic social forces of the 20th century, communism, National Socialism (Nazisim,) and capitalism were all responsible for very violent and disastrous disruptions of art and culture.
The most interesting is probably Hitler – a political leader who viewed himself as an artist, and as an authority in artistic matters. He entirely reshaped the arts world of his country. Through the use of eugenics and genocide he even aspired to sculpt the human race to fit his aesthetic ideals.
So I think one of the first orders of “business” in your class would be to not only explore the idea that beauty is by nature ephemeral and cannot be defined, but to extend that to the understanding that those who aspire to impose concepts of beauty upon institutions inevitably destroy them. It’s that old story about how fools are always so certain of themselves while wiser people are full of doubts. Perhaps the solution to such ignorance, and the ultimate goal of your class, would be to teach people how to truly and deeply listen. Good luck with your course.
Amen, brother. You hit the nail on the head: aesthetics is anathema to profits. The cult of beauty can only distract from the sole interest of business: fattening the bottom line, as you point out. So while artworks may be the object of flirtation by corporate types, the flame of desire is there only so long as they can get tax breaks for laundering their profits into donations to “educational” foundations. Also, there is the understanding that in hard times, PhD’s can find work outside of Academe–historians do as archivists for corporations and government agencies, so maybe art majors can find a desk in the halls of business–surrounded by nice, expensive pictures on the walls and puzzling statues outside.
Better to offer courses in how to judge and buy art that will go up in value so when some other wave become all the rage, you can sell it for a nice profit!
And kind of you to wish the author success. You are brutally honest but you remember your manners.
Years ago, working at McGill University’s Faculty of Management, I was often struck by our proximity to other faculties but often felt there was an invisible wall between disciplines. It was thinkers like Nancy Adler and Henry Mintzberg at McGill that opened my mind to collaborative approaches to problem solving and how working across disciplines can create new perspectives and innovative solutions to management and socioeconomic challenges. Now, many years later as an instructor in Arts Administration at SAIC, I teach a course called Art of Management that explores how organizations use arts-based learning to develop new approaches to innovation. We hear so much about what management thinking can contribute to the arts and the nonprofit world and not enough about what the arts and artistic processes can bring to the field of management. There is nothing more valuable than diversity of experience and diversity of thought to address the many challenges confronting organizations and communities across all disciplines.
I applaud your efforts!
HI Diane, Here are some others whose ideas/works you might want to consider:
1. Nikos Papastergiadis: Spatial Aesthetics, Art, Place, and the Everyday (http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/tod/TOD%235.pdf)
2. Shalini Venturelli: From the Information Economy to the Creative Economy: http://www.americansforthearts.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2013/by_program/afta_pubs/cac_pubs/venturelli.pdf
3. The work of Lily Yeh
4. Eric Booth’s EVERYDAY WORK OF ART
Hope you are well. Latifah Taormina who met you briefly at an APASO conference in Bay Area when I was working with Austin Circle of Theaters — that became Austin Creative Alliance. Love trying to keep up with your very alive creative mind.
Wow, I really like this approach. Especially to include beauty as a subject within business administration. It is a big step away from the numbers crunching MBA’s often are.
It would be great if you were able in the end to interact with other subjects being taught, so beauty is not a separate subject apart from the ‘hard’ subjects. And then could move on to using the arts within business to inspire new business, new ways of working, innovation. See for example (sorry it is only in Dutch) this article from Slow Management: http://www.art-partner.nl/artnew/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/201501_SlowManagement31_Creatieven-stoken-innovatievuurtje-aan_ArtPartner.pdf.
I am curious to see your next posts!
William Osborn above is right. If you really want to teach contemporary aesthetics to business majors you need to tell them that more than liking everything they are going to be doing in business will be anti-aesthetic.
I’ve often noticed in various AJ blogs that there seems to be a divide in perspectives between the thinking of artists and arts administrators. (Yes, there are a few artist-administrators, especially in spoken theater, but are they the norm?) Why do these differences exist, if they do?
One wouldn’t expect an average musician to be capable of managing an orchestra, or an average painter an arts museum. And by contrast, how much artistic sophistication should we expect arts administrators to have?
Has there been a trend over the last 20 years for arts administrators to take larger roles in the artistic decisions of their institutions? If so, what is the rationale? Is this trend related to neoliberal economic philosophies that position the high arts more and more strongly in the marketplace? How do the effects vary between genres, since some, like spoken theater, are inherently more market-oriented than others, such as classical music?
What happens to something as amorphous and fragile as conceptions of art and beauty when they fall more and more under the control of MBAs who do not have the time to develop highly evolved artistic understandings and abilities? How do administrators collaborate with artists to create conceptions of art and beauty (artistic visions or missions) for institutions? Would the students consider these questions relevant? If so, how would they respond?
William,
As to your initial questions about arts asministrators, many arts administrators (including myself back in the day) were artists to start. I have an MFA. I don’t have a business degree. My MFA degree was not intended to prepare me to run a business; and yet I did so quite successfully. There are orchestra executive directors that began as musicians, as well. Moreover, I would venture to say that the artistic directors (and artists) I worked with (when I was a business manager and a funder) valued the fact that I was an avid arts-goer and could talk intelligently with them about art. As to the rest, I believe the arts and society generally can only benefit if more people (business people, teachers, arts administrators, hospital administrators, anyone) are encouraged and given opportunity to think about beauty and cultivate an aesthetic sensibility. We can, of course, agree to disagree.
Best,
D
Thank you, Diane. I think your course will be very interesting and truly beneficial. It’s true that many have crossed or straddle artist/administrator lines, which are often blurry to begin with. My question is: has there been a shift in the influence administrators have in the aesthetic directions of their institutions? Is this part of a new practice in situating the arts more closely in the marketplace? What would this imply about the training of arts administrators in issues such as aesthetic philosophy and its practical applications?
I think an interesting guest artist for the class would be Pauline Oliveros who gives workshops in a practice she calls Deep Listening. Her work is specifically designed to breakdown artistic hierarchies and to study and open new modes of perception. Administrators and artists would be treated on an equal footing. I think her philosophies would fit the course very well, and would be very beneficial and memorable for young arts administrators. Pauline’s philosophies and approaches seem very similar to yours. Lots of info about Deep Listening here:
http://deeplistening.org/site/
Again, good luck with your course. I’m not just being polite, I think the course is valuable and I really mean it.
William –
Thanks very much for the encouragement and the information on Pauline Oliveros – I will definitely look her up.
So, this particular iteration of the course will not be offered to arts admin students (though you are correct that this was my original aim). As to your question, I think it’s hard to answer whether arts administrators are having increasing influence on programming without a study of some sort. Having said that, I do note that there have been more than a few cases in the resident theater realm in which artistic directors have resigned and been replaced by managing directors who serve as single leaders who oversee both programming and administration. Rocco Landeman has spoken about this trend here and there.. And there is a good bit of research that has examined the increase in power of administrators in arts organizations over time, generally. This is often attributed to the fact that they serve as “boundary spanners” between the organizations and its resource environment. Most notably, they develop the relationships with government, funders, corporations, and donors and become the link to securing those resources for the organization. Two final points:
First, I wonder if in the future we will stop seeing these divided organizations (the money side lined up under the MD and the art side lined up under the AD) and more of a move to everyone in the org thinking about the art and the money? And would this be a bad thing?
Second, my original aim in having arts administration students think about aesthetics stemmed from thinking that it would be good for these students (who intended to run an arts organization someday, rather than a hospital or a private school) to have a point of view about art (i.e., be aware of their own tastes) and some skills and comfort in talking about art. (In the same vein that some believe that it is beneficial for artistic directors to be able to understand a balance sheet and read the budget).
Thanks, again.
Thanks for the comments!
Latifah – I appreciate the links! And thanks for the kind words.
Joost – I will look up the article (thanks!) and also find your idea of interacting with other subjects an appealing idea. For one, it would not marginalize beauty/aesthetics as an “elective” but would seek to use it as a different lens to apply to look at any given situation/problem/etc (if I understand your point). Additionally, I by no means see this as a course only for business majors. It strikes me that aesthetic development, approaching beauty if you will, is something all students should be given the encouragement and opportunity to pursue while at university.
Kenny – I love hearing about your class and I agree that we have been so accustomed to thinking in terms of what arts people need to learn from business leaders. This has definitely been changing in the last decade (with the focus on creativity, and the influence of people like Daniel Pink, etc.) and the invisible veil seems to be coming down. Would love to hear more about your course offline.
And William, Richard & Eric – Thanks for your candor. I have expected some skepticism about the class. I would be remiss if I did not reiterate the point from my post that I didn’t show up at the doorstep of the University of Wisconsin with an army and demand to teach a course on beauty to business majors. This was an idea that a group in the business school proposed to me. A second point of clarification: this class is not about imposing a particular definition of beauty, or reinforcing artistic hierarchies, or any such thing. It is about giving students the opportunity to look at the world through an aesthetic lens for 12 weeks and to learn from that experience. With all due respect, I think it is rather ungenerous to presume that because these students are pursuing a business degree providing them with a course in beauty or aesthetics would be a waste of time and energy. You underestimate today’s business students and business faculty. Lastly, I’ll leave you with a comment that Devon Smith of 24 Usable Hours tweeted when she read about the course, “my ‘philosophy of aesthetics’ class was most transformative course as an undergrad biz major.”
Thanks, again, to all for taking the time to read and post.
Our neoliberal capitalism wants to think of the arts as a product. It is already requiring the arts to engage with what an audience may want., to involve communities in its decision making process liking they were a products focus group.. We don’t really publicly support the arts intrinsic and “unproductive” value any longer. We expect it to pay its own way just like any other business. If your course is going teach the fact that that is not how great art is made I think it would be a course that not only would benefit business majors but would be important for everyone to take.
I’m so excited that this course is finally rolling ahead, and you’ve framed the opportunities and challenges in wonderful ways. Thanks for committing to posting what you’re doing and what you’re discovering in a public way on your blog. And thanks for diving into a fascinating opportunity to rethink and reshape what the students perceive as beauty, and how they focus their own intention and intent on those discoveries.
Bon voyage! And thanks.
It might be useful to help the students understand how ideas about beauty have shaped American cultural history. They could see that that our concepts of beauty are never stable and that they constantly transform. Beauty is not so much a state of being as a never fulfilled desire, an endless quest that shapes the cultural history of humanity. This can be seen in the cultural history of America. A few examples of the chronology might include:
+ The Enlightenment ethos of the country’s founders and its manifestations in scientism as exemplified by people like Franklin and Jefferson. Neo-classical order, privileged democracy, and rationalism defined the beauty of the day.
+ The rise of the Transcendentalists in the 1820s and 30s and their concepts of American self-reliance and Unitarian forms of spirituality as manifested by people like Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller. Beauty became an avenue for reaching the higher self. Their Unitarianism was strongly influenced by the evolving field of Hindu studies. They might be seen as among early prototypes of the inherent globalism in American culture and concepts of beauty.
+ The rise of post-civil war capitalism and the evolution of America’s benefactor culture with its view of art as beneficent edification and a moral good for the public. Beauty became a balm to social disease.
+ The great migration, and rise of African-American urban culture, as manifested by events such as the Harlem Renaissance. Beauty began to boogie among the Greek columns.
+ The destruction of social mores through the horrors of WWI, the rise of the Jazz age, and the celebratory, bourgeois lawlessness created by prohibition. Cinema began its march toward becoming the dominant art form. Beauty became having fun and defying those who said it shouldn’t be.
+ The socially oriented Americana of the 1930s centered on the New Deal and the Great Depression as represented by artists like Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, and John Steinbeck. Beauty was seen as springing from the heart of American ideals.
+ The masculinization and militarization of American culture created by WWII. Beauty was defined as sacrifice, prosperity, and the natural strength of domination.
+ The Cold War and its existential disorientation and exhaustion of the Beats during the late 40 and 50s which led to the revolutionary culture and civil rights movements of the 60s. Beauty became hallucinogenic and was most deeply manifested in a rejection of materialism that allowed for love and peace.
+ The rise of postmodernism in the 1970s with its embrace of irony, multiculturalism, and the leveling of aesthetic hierarchies. Valley girls became as beautiful as Beethoven. The beauty of the feminine mystique was tossed and a quest for the beauty of true power began. And black continued to be beautiful.
+ The consequent rise of neo-conservative postmodernism as advocated by people like Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom, and Norman Podhoretz. While still embracing the market, neo-conservatives insisted that the beautiful achievements of cultural history could not be discounted.
And so the students will face the daunting question of “What now?” The ephemeral and evolving nature of beauty demands that we not only look at what it was and is, but also what it will be.
Interestingly, no one seems to be doing more to create a solid embodiment of the next phase of beauty in American cultural history than young arts administrators who are mostly women. I haven’t followed these trends close enough to really define them, so I might be wrong, but we are seeing the first generation of women who have had enough power to call the shots. Especially the younger ones seem to have the confidence to not only think differently, but also to put their new philosophies into practice. Art is to be something more democratic, communal, and spiritual. It is to have a stronger moral and ethical grounding. And it is to be pragmatic. The masculinist conception of the artist as an isolated, transcendent hero is replaced with a sense of connection that better serves people. And in this sense of connection, art is to be smaller, something local, accessible, something bound to the community. Our new sense of beauty will be shaped by these attitudes.
It seems strange (and a bit troubling) that people involved with administration and policy would be making more concrete progress toward defining new concepts of culture than artists themselves. Without the narrowed focus required to create art, they stand back and look at the larger picture. They are less genre bound than most artists, so it’s more natural for them to consider cross-disciplinary views. This seems to allow for broader cultural concepts. And as fund-raisers, they by nature consider closely the relationship of art to society. Many also work in smaller, more open institutions where it easier to try new concepts that shape policy. They aren’t too big to fail, so they can experiment. And since so many are women, they seem to be part of a larger, emancipatory force of history creating new social perspectives about beauty, art, and culture.