Accidental Blogger

When a car company like G.M. is in the art business, every company in any other industry is, too.

Rather than extend a discussion in which I’ve been a vociferous—maybe even loudmouth—participant below the comment line of Ruchira’s post regarding poet-doctor Fady Joudah, I thought I’d take her and Joe’s suggestions to address in a new post a recent related article in the New York Times. In my comments to the former post, I’ve been trying to defend the vocation of poet against its marginalization and appropriation within an ethos of scientific mastery. With respect to Joudah, I detected an implication in the article and in Ruchira’s comments that his poetry could be no more than an afterthought—a quaint, refreshing occasion of self-expression and incisive poetic observation, but clearly secondary—to his demanding day job, and that while a rigorous scientific pursuit such as medical science can muster the cognitive wherewithal to appropriate, master, apply, and create poetry, the converse does not obtain. I maintain that such an implication is wholly in error.

Now this NYT article about Messrs. Pink and Bomeisler is making a similar gesture, or at least it’s reporting that Pink and Bomeisler are making such a gesture. The article relates how these two, among others, are evangelizing to big business about a critical need for creative thinking in an age of algorithmic metastasis. It’s a creativity associated with the nonverbal, nonlinear, “high concept” site of the brain’s machinery. Tellingly, the mode of intellect is painfully described by one proponent in the tritest of phrases, “thinking outside the box.”

Part of my persistent aggravation with science’s bullying of art is attributable to this kind of shoddy, facile reporting. For instance, what is one to do with a sentence like this: “That alternate way of thinking has traditionally been marginalized in corporate America, as it has been in the rest of our culture” (my emphasis)? I can agree with the first clause—obviously, corporate America discards every way of thinking not fiercely devoted to the sway of capital—but the final clause is more than mere exaggeration. It is an instance of what it purports to describe, namely, ignorance. One can only refer to a monolithic culture devoid of creative thinking if one defines culture in terms exclusive of the salient landmarks of such thought.

But am I not contradicting myself? On the Joudah post, I ranted about the creeping subordination of poetry to science. Now journalist Rae-Dupree, execs at G.M., zoologist Dr. Sperry, bestselling author Betty Edwards, and Pink and Bomeisler seem to be making a similar assessment and, what’s more, they’re actually trying to do something about it. But that’s not what’s going on here. Despite the remark from Pink about the “moral to the story”—as if his readers and Bomeisler’s customers were seeking moral advice—the “power” he ascribes to thinking without a plan is precisely an instrumental reason, one that facilitates a superior career choice. It’s eminently practical and substantially uncreative. The touchstone remains the utility of “see[ing] from an artist’s perspective”—as if there were only one such perspective, as if what distinguishes the artistic from business or science is simply its “perspective,” the artist’s idiosyncratic determination to remain outside the box—for science, technology, and industry, the Fortune 500, Halliburton…

The prescription Pink, Rae-Dupree, et al. are making on behalf of corporate America—the rewards of winging it, of improvising without a score—serves only to indicate that what ails corporate America is its belatedness vis-à-vis industries of creativity. The spirit of improvisation has for decades supported its own cottage industry, particularly in music rooted in traditions of folk, blues, classical, jazz, and beyond. But nobody imagines that G.M. is in the “art business” to pursue any ambition for innovation or corporate derring-do. To the contrary, it appears more likely that the creative improvisatory traditions are entering an accelerated phase of mass production courtesy of big business and, at its service, “science and emerging technology,” the beat covered by Rae-Dupree.