Dialogues between Art and Business

Book excerpt: The relationship between the fine art and the business sphere has never been harmonious; it has been rejected, fought about, ignored, exploited, criticised and questioned, but it is still omnipresent. Commonly assumed to be antagonistic, situating art and the business organisation sphere in the discourses of new knowledge creation and learning, however, holds the potential of exploring new ways of relating the two spheres. This book investigates such potentialities, discussing the limits and challenges of these new forms of relating. It does so by first outlining the changing discourses of the art and business spheres, and how they produce different ways of relating to their respective worlds. Second, it brings into conversation an ethnographic study of an art-business-collaboration organised by two artists with a Deleuzian concept of dialogue. Dialogue, here, is understood as a non-hierarchical encounter developing between two spheres; a source of creation no longer belonging to anyone. In what is here termed “a machinic research framework” – accounting for composition and movement on all scales – the book shows how making connections is a discursive and material practice with expectations and imaginaries playing a central role. It also addresses the paradoxical interplays between losing control and maintaining control in collaborative attempts, between reaching out for the Other and carrying out identity work, and between positions in the centre and in the margins of the highly stratified and codified areas of business organisations and fine art. Eventually, this book examines small dialogical instances that escape the stratifying forces dividing the two worlds, thereby creating a temporary space. It closes with a reflection on the role of research in thinking (and making) new ways of relating the world of fine art and the business organisation sphere.