The Art Firm: Aesthetic Management and Metaphysical Marketing

by Pierre Guillet de Monthoux

Overview

The Art Firm explores the seemingly unorthodox alliance of the arts, management, and marketing. Art firms—as avant-garde enterprises and arts corporations—have existed for at least two hundred years, using texts, images, and other types of art to create corporate wealth. This book investigates how to apply the methods artists use in creating value to the methods more traditional managers use in running their businesses.

Guillet de Monthoux offers a crash course in aesthetics from Kant to Gadamer, showing how aesthetic management and metaphysical marketing can create value. Using case studies of successful art managers from Richard Wagner to Robert Wilson, the author illustrates the creative role—so central to value-making in contemporary economies—performed by aesthetic play in art firms. Along the way, Guillet de Monthoux points out how responsible aesthetic management and marketing can eradicate the problems of banality and totality, the two capital sins of an art-based economy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804748131
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	01/13/2004
Series:	Stanford Business Books (Hardcover)
Edition description:	1
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Pierre Guillet de Monthoux is Professor and Chair of General Management, School of Business, Stockholm University, Sweden. He has also written The Moral Philosophy of Management and edited Good Novels Better Management (with Barbara Czarniawska).

Table of Contents

	Preface: Welcome to Dionysus Inc.	xi
Chapter 1	Play as Aesthetic Schwung	1
	Points of Departure--Aesthetic Theaters	1
	Operating Theater	1
	Lecturing Theater	7
	Festival Theater	11
	Schiller's Schwung Strategy	15
Chapter 2	Players in Aesthetic Philosophy	21
	Audience: Kant's Public	21
	Third-Way Philosophy	21
	The Sublime and the Beautiful	23
	Aesthetics for Publicity	27
	Artist: Schelling's Creator	31
	Aesthetics for Creativity	31
	Creating Symbols	36
	The Philosophical Genius	39
	Critic: Dewey's Educator	43
	Managing Art	43
	Market Art	49
	Aesthetics for Democracy	56
	Technician: Nietzsche's Leader	59
	Aesthetics for Energy	59
	Schwungsong Wagner	62
	Schwungdance Napoleon	66
Chapter 3	Problems for Art Firms	73
	Gadamer's Art Firm	73
	The Dual Dilemma	79
	Totality--Imploding Art Work	79
	Banality--Exploding Art Work	86
Chapter 4	Metaphysics--Marketing of Art Firms	94
	Schopenhauer's Business of Being	94
	Aesthetic Production--Embodying the Thing-in-Itself	100
	Aesthetic Consumption--Contemplating the Thing-in-itself	104
Chapter 5	Avant-Garde Enterprises	110
	Cases of Aesthetic Management	110
	Wagner's Bayreuth Brand	110
	Theatre Libre--Antoine's Naturalist Project	121
	Theatre de l'OEuvre--Lugne's Symbolist Undertaking	127
	Metaphysics of Value	133
	Kahnweiler's Symbolic Surplus	133
	Kandinsky's Rhetoric Surplus	140
	Genette's Immanent Object	148
Chapter 6	Artistic Companies	154
	Cases of Aesthetic Management	154
	David's Festival Firm	154
	Stanislavski's Backstage Studio	160
	Diaghilev's Frontstage Ballet	174
	Metaphysics of Politics	186
	Discovering the State of Nature	186
	Designing Cultures for Nations	190
	Legendre's Mirror of Modernity	194
Chapter 7	Art Corporations	202
	Metaphysics of Industry	202
	Culture for Workers	202
	Nature of Work	214
	Cases of Aesthetic Management	219
	Father Alf in Democratic Industry	219
	Mother Osten and Industrial Democracy	233
Chapter 8	Flux Firms	247
	Beuys's Aesthetic Management of Social Sculpture	247
	Extending Art as Capital	247
	Human Capital When Everyone Is an Artist	253
	Simmel's Metaphysics of Organization	262
Chapter 9	Postmod Performances	269
	Big Bang Berlin: Rephilosophizing the Third	269
	Cases of Aesthetic Management	283
	Muller Performing Matter	283
	Wilson Performing Form	287
	Castorf's Media-Consumption Metaphysics	296
	Berliner Boxer	296
	Stockholmer Schwung	304
Chapter 10	Dionysus Inc.--Extending the Art Firm	316
	Aesthetic Management and Metaphysical Marketing	316
	The Dualism--Aesthetic Management Against Totality and Banality	316
	The Third--Metaphysics of Art Work	322
	The Embedded Art Firm and Its Aesthetic Players	327
	Technicians Torn Between Production and Finance	327
	Artists Halfway Between Design and Media	332
	Critics from Marketing Toward Culture	336
	Audience of Half Consumers and Half Managers	339
	An Emerging Art Firm: Pistoletto's Aesthetic Play	347
	Notes	359
	Index	373

Editorial Reviews

"This is a wonderfully readable and delightful text, reminiscent of the energy of Žižek's cultural diagnoses."

Choice

"Expansive in its scope, The Art Firm is one of the most interesting management books I've read in some time. It is eloquently written and delivers important conclusions that will be of enduring importance. It should become the authoritative work on the relationship of art and aesthetics and the practice of business."

Harvard Business School, Author of Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work - Robert D. Austin

"Although there are many books that purport to address the issues of business and the arts, I have yet to find such an engaging, challenging, and intellectually playful investigation of these issues as The Art Firm. Guillet de Monthoux romps through European thought and artistic enterprises with remarkable agility. This work, peppered with illustrative examples from history to the present day, asks important questions of our management oriented culture."

Columbia University - Ruth Bereson

"Guillet de Monthoux's close contact with the cultural world and its players... leads to an important contribution to our understanding of organization and the broader economy as captured in this book."

Organization Studies

"With The Art Firm: Aesthetic Management and Metaphysical Marketing Pierre Guillet de Monthoux provides the growing contemporary research field of organisational aesthetics with an invaluable sourcebook. At once a history of ideas and a history of organisational forms, it demonstrates the profound relevance of aesthetic philosophy for management and organisation studies, while at the same time it reveals how the post-Kantian philosophical tradition has taken shape in and through a series of encounters with particular organisations."

Philosophy of Management

"By evoking—really depicting and conjuring—successful models from both art and business, Guillet de Monthoux convincingly demonstrates that managers must look beyond the traditional places for their ideas of how to run businesses. This book is particularly timely, offering a valuable and too long neglected perspective on 'creative' and 'inspired' ways to run businesses."

Chicago-Kent College of Law - Claire Hill

"Expansive in its scope, The Art Firm is one of the most interesting management books I've read in some time. It is eloquently written and delivers important conclusions that will be of enduring importance. It should become the authoritative work on the relationship of art and aesthetics and the practice of business."—Robert D. Austin, Harvard Business School, Author of Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work


"Although there are many books that purport to address the issues of business and the arts, I have yet to find such an engaging, challenging, and intellectually playful investigation of these issues as The Art Firm. Guillet de Monthoux romps through European thought and artistic enterprises with remarkable agility. This work, peppered with illustrative examples from history to the present day, asks important questions of our management oriented culture."—Ruth Bereson, Program in Arts Administration, Teachers College, Columbia University


"By evoking—really depicting and conjuring—successful models from both art and business, Guillet de Monthoux convincingly demonstrates that managers must look beyond the traditional places for their ideas of how to run businesses. This book is particularly timely, offering a valuable and too long neglected perspective on 'creative' and 'inspired' ways to run businesses."—Claire Hill, Chicago-Kent College of Law


"This is a wonderfully readable and delightful text, reminiscent of the energy of Zizek's cultural diagnoses."—Choice


"Guillet de Monthoux's close contact with the cultural world and its players... leads to an important contribution to our understanding of organization and the broader economy as captured in this book."—Organization Studies
"With The Art Firm: Aesthetic Management and Metaphysical Marketing Pierre Guillet de Monthoux provides the growing contemporary research field of organisational aesthetics with an invaluable sourcebook. At once a history of ideas and a history of organisational forms, it demonstrates the profound relevance of aesthetic philosophy for management and organisation studies, while at the same time it reveals how the post-Kantian philosophical tradition has taken shape in and through a series of encounters with particular organisations."—Philosophy of Management

From the Publisher