Everything You Need to Know About Business, You Could Have Learned in Art School

I spent years as a visual artist and teaching art before I ever started a nonprofit or even later started a business. People typically think of those eras like they were two separate lives or that I wasted my time in art and somehow came to my senses and got into business. What they don't understand is that art is precisely what gave me my senses. Nearly everything I know about starting companies, leading teams, and developing leaders, I first learned standing in front of my own canvas or analyzing someone else’s painting, drawing, or sculpture.
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Here are ten of those lessons just to get started.

LESSON ONE: Facing the blank canvas (starting a business) is hard and it should be. Making something is easy. Making something that inspires you and the market is incredibly difficult.

It takes courage to make the first mark. It takes courage and creativity to keep adapting that first choice and iterating toward something whole and purposeful – especially when you know that no mark is perfect. When I started my first business, one of my developers gave me a book called Art and Fear. If you are building anything from scratch, go read it.

LESSON TWO: Business isn't just about building or selling more - or more disruptive - innovation. Sometimes it's about identifying and addressing a weakness in the market and providing a successful solution.

Look at the Degas painting. The whole scene is structurally precarious, which mirrors the psychological and physical presence of the woman at its center. She is barely there. Slumped. Slightly leaning. Not looking at anything. Now take your finger and block out the newspaper that connects the table in the foreground to the table holding the pitcher. The entire composition starts to fall apart. Everything hinges on that one fragile connection, and most people either don't notice it or find it merely curious but not important. The best opportunities usually live right there.

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LESSON THREE: Every product or service you offer is being seen and experienced from different perspectives simultaneously.

Picasso painted time and perspective at once, capturing a face from different angles and different moments as if the combination were truer than any single view. His portraits make us ask questions. They keep us exploring. The moment we get comfortable with one perspective (typically our own), we tend to stop doing both.

LESSON FOUR: If you don't build your product or service with an eye on the whole, then it's going to fall apart when it interacts with the real world. No one uses it exactly the way you want them to.

Here are two still lifes painted a little more than a decade apart, in clearly different styles. The left by Cezanne, the right by Manet. 

​Now turn them upside down.

Something interesting happens. Cezanne's bowl of fruit becomes more of an abstraction, but it still holds together as a whole image. What we used to identify as the wall now holds up what we used to identify as a typical bowl of fruit. The cloth that used to hang off the bottom of the image with gravity now seems to cling to the top and hold things up. Manet's fish and pot, on the other hand, start sliding off the page. Cezanne didn't merely represent his objects in paint. He painted the whole, the relationship among the parts, their relationship to their environment. Those relationships still exist upside down.

And, it's not about being “done” or having every feature or bell and whistle complete.

Here is another still life by Cezanne on the left. The upside down version on the right. It holds together. It isn't even complete. Or maybe that's exactly the point. Maybe it is.

LESSON FIVE: If you put something out into the world, you open it and yourself to the world's interpretations and use.

Basquiat went from a cryptic street artist to one of the biggest names in art. He died of an overdose, and his images and his struggles are still being sold today. Do we understand what he was trying to say? Do we care? Did he want the fame he got? Was he playing the art establishment, or were they playing him? Setting aside the tragedy of a young life lost, the answer doesn't matter much. You open the door, and the world walks through it on its own terms.

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LESSON SIX: Positive and negative are rarely as binary - or as obvious - as we have been taught to believe.

One of the first things you learn in art is the concept of positive and negative space. The point is to open the world beyond the surface – not to close it down to two options. Many of us spend our lives oversimplifying life into binaries, life in black or white. Customers buy or don't buy. Products work or don’t work. People are right for the job or they’re not. Kline's work – and I’d argue life itself - asks you to slow down and actually look, to be present with what you're observing and let it tell you something instead of imposing your own conclusion. Decisions and opinions are cheap. Learning, listening, and discerning are of a higher order.

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LESSON SEVEN: Without leadership, people will take their next step based on what they see in front of them and what they understand their options to be.

Escher's drawings are often fun, like a puzzle, somehow both mathematical and controlled while joyous and free. But try to navigate them with unthinking logic and you end up somewhere (or nowhere) you never could have imagined. Years ago, I read advice about not following in a leader's footsteps but instead seeking what they sought. This is how Cezanne became Cezanne and Picasso Picasso. Follow Escher's stairs blindly and you dead end. Understand where he was trying to go, and you can chart your own path.

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LESSON EIGHT: Sometimes you have to say things more clearly and obviously than you ever imagined you'd have to just to make your point. And, humor often helps.

Maurizio Cattelan wanted to make a piece about the loss of direction and challenges he saw in the Catholic Church. I'd say he made his point. Yes, it's profane, and it will offend some. It's also genuinely funny, and it is deliberate in every detail. Subtlety is a luxury you can't always afford when the message really matters. 

LESSON NINE: One member can set the tone for a whole team or even culture.

Look at the woman in the front with the sickly green glow. She defines the image. You can catch that same green off in the distance, but on her face, quite literally in your face as the viewer, it tells you this bar and this scene are a little seedier and less certain than you might otherwise notice. You may have someone on your team casting that glow. And you may have grown so used to it that you no longer recognize what's actually driving the sickness – even when it’s right in your face.

LESSON TEN: Rhythm and repetition are what build structure and flow.

You can hear Jacob Lawrence's paintings. You can hear the hustle and noise of the city. You can hear the back and forth of sawing and lifting and placing and building. You hear all of it because of his visual structure, his rhythm, his repetition. Do the scenes create the rhythm and repetition, or do the rhythm and repetition create the scenes? They are like jazz with individual actors moving freely within their space while contributing to the melody of the whole. This is how the best teams work – clear roles and contributions with the freedom to have some style and be human.

I hope you've enjoyed these. Obviously, the point isn't that art explains all of business. It's that the same attention, courage, and care that make an artwork come alive, communicate, and hold together are what make anything come alive, communicate, and hold together. It's the whole. 

​IMAGES:
Edgar Degas, “The Absinthe Drinker”, 1876
Paul Cezanne, “Dish of Apples”, 1876-77
Eduard Manet, “Fish (Still Life)”, 1864
Paul Cezanne, “Still Life with Water Jug”, 1892-93
Jean Michel Basquiat, “Guilt of Gold Teeth”, 1982
Franz Kline, “Untitled”, 1956
M.C. Escher, “Relativity”, 1953
Maurizio Cattelan, “La Nona Ora”, 1999
Toulouse Lautrec, “At the Moulin Rouge”, 1892/95
Jacob Lawrence, “This is Harlem”, 1943
Jacob Lawrence, “The Builders”, 1974