About a year ago, Jill Lepore (David Woods Kemper Professor of American History at Harvard University) published an article in The New Yorker entitled The Disruption Machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong.
Lepore’s essay is a long and complex thesis to which disservice would be done if one tried to paraphrase it in 3-4 sentences. As the title suggests, the Harvard historian challenges the popular theory of Disruptive Innovation which is “a term of art” coined by Harvard Business School Professor of Business Administration, Clayton Christensen.
According to Christensen, Disruption Innovation “describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.”
Christensen’s description of Disruption Innovation continues – including my insertions [ – ] which corrolate the way it relates to the art market:
“As companies [artist/dealers] tend to innovate faster than their customers’ [private or public collectors’] needs evolve, most organizations [galleries and auction houses] eventually end up producing products or services [visual arts] that are actually too sophisticated, too expensive, and too complicated for many customers [collectors] in their market.
Companies pursue these ‘sustaining innovations’ [works of art] at the higher tiers of their markets [affluent collectors, or museums] because this is what has historically helped them succeed: by charging the highest prices to their most demanding and sophisticated customers [collectors] at the top of the market, companies [galleries and auction houses] will achieve the greatest profitability.
However, by doing so, companies unwittingly open the door to ‘disruptive innovations’ at the bottom of the market…“
And, so on.
Christensen may very well have drawn inspiration for his theory of Disruption Innovation – his “term of art” – from histories of artistic innovation which have been formally documented since the age of Giorgio Vasari, c. 1550. It is no coincidence that the 16th century also marked the advent of the art market, as we know it. This was the era during which individuals began to acquire art for their private, and even secular, pleasure.
In his critical study Modern Art in the Common Culture, Thomas Crow (Yale University’s Professor of Art History) writes, “From its beginnings, the artistic avant-garde has discovered, renewed, or re-invented itself by identifying with marginal, ‘non-artistic’ forms of expressivity and display – forms improvised by other social groups out of the degraded materials of capitalist manufacture… The identification with the social practices of mass diversion – whether uncritically reproduced, caricatured or transformed into abstract Arcadias – remains a durable constant in early modernism.” Crow cites Manet’s Olympia (1863) as the tipping point of modern Disruptive Innovation. That would be 150 years before our time.
For well over two weeks, Lepore-Christensen’s disruptive dialogue spread across the web with more than a dozen published angry responses to the Harvard historian’s essay. Pretty much every single one of these rebuttals expressed outrage at Lepore’s audacity to critique their Harvard Guru’s contributions to theories of business administration.
Having spent too long (more than 15 years) pursuing academic research, I am well accustomed to academics’ “Revolutions are great … but not in my backyard” psyche. So, these exchanges served as entertaining reminders that this attitude is as equally and widely prevalent among business professionals.
“Disruptions are great … but not in my backyard.”
And, here is the rub: in their attempts to forge seemingly self-sufficient markets, the business sector efficiently extracts all allusions to humanities, especially history – complex cycles of innovation and decline – the same way that humanists extract economic realities – financial and market forces – from their rhetoric on histories of aesthetic and cultural production.
To Disrupt (Oxford Dictionary):
VERB: To interrupt (an event, activity, or process) by causing a disturbance or problem; To drastically alter or destroy the structure of (something).
After my amusement at this cyber war between MBA-armed financial advisers and that lonely (though symbolically representative of all) humanist-historian(s) faded away, I came full circle back to my own experiences of working with public and private collectors.
Though Lepore’s critics conveyed their up-to-date knowledge of theories of business, I was bewildered by how they had collectively bought into a single academically-produced business management theory.
I was equally baffled by the ways in which their arguments fell apart, even in short 500-word texts. A fairly generic response began with:
I hold an MBA [expensive university degree] from a [brand name elite] university. I have done X number of years of research [pedigree & history], under so and so [famous brand name elitist academic]. I am now the CEO [important position, hierarchy] of a company [pedigree] which has been in business for x number of years [pedigree & history].
Yet, every article concludes with, something like:
Unfortunately, there are those who would hide behind the arguments of preserving the good old days [pedigree & history] to hold onto the preferential position [elitist academic], hierarchy [Oops! There it is], and control [CEO? Important position?] that they have selfishly guarded [elitist].
At first, I wondered whether these gentlemen do not realize that their arguments embody the antithesis of that which they defend?
Then, I realized, that the problem was that a disruption has been imposed on one of the most “widely cited and celebrated ideas in modern business” [Businessweek] and the disrupters aren’t happy about it.
The disrupters have taken offense at being disrupted.
Well, I’ll be damned.
How does all this relate to “art collecting,” you may ask?
In the American educational context, the two fields of humanities and finance do not meet since they are mutually considered inconsequential. This is why even the study of the art market – with history of collecting, at its roots – is regarded as an esoteric field in art history circles. It is also the reason why art and its markets are often, and quite inadequately, taught by organizations that have their own limited agendas, e.g. auction houses.
*I, for example, had to move to England to pursue research into the history of collecting which is the examination of intersections between histories of art and economics, at The Courtauld Institute of Art and University of Oxford.
This growing lack of mutual appreciation for and acknowledgement between our financial and cultural sectors has bred a most perversely monstrous art market. An unregulated market whose currency is based on our national-cultural heritage, its past, present and future.
Recognizing the growing gap between the two camps of humanities and the financial sector, an army of opportunist pretenders have commandeered the (modern and contemporary) art market(s) for their own short-term and short-sighted benefits. A huge majority of them would trade fixtures and fittings or, for example, exotic spices if they could make as much seemingly easy money as in the art market.
Have I mention that, according to Bloomberg News, in 2013 Global art sales approached their pre-crisis high of $66 Billion?
Every day, our financial elites are duped by a certain breed of art advisers, and flippers, who are masters at spouting third-rate fashionable pseudo-academic jargons … often, at cocktail parties. And, there is no one to reign in these carpetbaggers…
“But… like … everything is art, man.”
No, it is not!
NEXT STOP: Advice on Collecting (part iii): In Defense of Wall Street