The Art Firm: Aesthetic Management and Metaphysical Marketing From Wagner to Wilson (review)

For those who could afford it, the 1990s sired a novel turn in business a ff airs. Freed of the banalities of material constraints, wealth became based upon the creative energizing of experience. This new economy fueled unrelenting gains in productivity, perpetually low inflation, and an ever-expanding run-up of the stock market. Or so it seemed. The gravity-defying economy soon came crashing down to earth even as the confidence that commerce had entered a new phase remained aloft. The idea that art holds the key to how work is managed reconfigures the relationship between aesthetics and labor, especially the entangled meaning of performance in business and in art. Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, a professor of management at Stockholm University, undertakes this project with great verve in his sweeping book, The Art Firm. This crossover dream is stated succinctly: "If art became the content of a new economy, the business context would in turn be reshaped by its energy. [...] Art is the main source for human creativity in work. By the vehicle of art, the artist offers an escape route from the mechanical-inorganic world" (253-54).

Far from being culturally or economically marginal, art for Guillet de Mon-thoux is a central motivator for human endeavors (194). He wants to find in both philosophy and political economy what he terms a "third way" between the compulsions of the state (whose support anesthetizes creativity) and the market (whose judgments and demands impoverish too many) (5). Management for Guillet de Monthoux is therefore both a philosophical and an organizational enterprise in which "art work[s] in a philosophical way" (95). The art firm is best exemplified in theatre where the artist, technician, audience, and critic with corresponding business cognates in design, production, management, and culture encounter one another (354). Aesthetics provides an understanding of the responsive, receptive, consensus-loving audience most appropriate to effective management.

Guillet de Monthoux adopts the romantic philosopher Schiller's idea of schwung, or swinging, between the mundane and the possible, between crass materialism and pure morality, so as to move beyond these binaries and affect the desire to play (19). He assimilates the released energies or flows of poststructuralists Deleuze and Guattari to "the Schillerian Schwung provoked by art firms" (198). From Kant he adopts the interest in aesthetic judgment as a means to create a unified audience, enlightened in a public space (30). From John Dewey, he takes the pragmatist's approach to art as an act that brings forth experience through "organized energy," as the manager must (54).

The Art Firm treats theatre the way a management book would, as a series of case studies of managerial strategies. For Guillet de Monthoux, Wagner's operatic spectacle overemphasizes a technical orientation (112). The ballet impresario Diaghilev leaves the "firm" overly dependent on marketing. Robert Wilson and Heiner Müller effectively manage experience by swinging between art and commerce, avoiding the avantgarde and Broadway, state sponsorship and private patronage to produce a postmodern aesthetic that can "win back mental space from commercial colonization" (291).

This Wilson/Müller approach creates "new ways of marketing by events, having design reflect art, speeding up production, and looking upon consumers as creative art audiences" (313). Yet while these new economy paeans are meant to transcend the tedium of capital and labor, state and market, many wars and tax cuts later, the ghosts of economies past come back to haunt us. Guillet de Monthoux seems most excited by longstanding models of private patronage and corporate sponsorship. He opens his book with an account of health care reform where a wealthy patron puts eye patients up in a hotel. His appreciation of Wilson includes the theatre-maker's willingness to be sponsored by Coke. This portrait of the artist as manager lends art considerable worldly utility. At a time when some dismiss art as irrelevant...