THE RELEVANCE OF THE FINE ARTS IN THE EMERGING WORLD OF BUSINESS

A Vignette for the New Millennium

By Dilip Mukerjea

Are you relevant to the future or relegated to the past?

The world is changing economically, culturally, socially, politically, technologically, environmentally, geographically, ecologically, and competitively. The value of Fine Arts, beyond their imaginative, aesthetic, or intellectual content, comes from their ability to portray any aspect of human thought, spanning the domains of business, science, technology, engineering, mathematics, design, and much else.

Every individual must change in step with these world changes. So must corporations and the human capital within them. Unless you are prepared for all these scenarios, you are prepared for none of them. Ask yourself, are you busy preparing for a set of careers that will soon be obsolete?

The nexus of art and business can translate into profound transformative learning environments, linking science, spirituality, and social change, for every possibility, well-contemplated, opens up a new organ of perception within us. Art serves as the crucial catalyst for these transformations.

We need creativity and innovation to live in a world where multiple realities have become the norm. Yet, each set of multiple realities poses a challenge, because no two people occupy the same slice of consciousness about anything. We just do not occupy the same knowledge space, often seeking refuge in our private sanctuaries of specialisation. Yet ‘art’ emerges as the great synthesiser in all these contexts.

Skills in creativity equip us with the capacity to succeed in the future. If we fail, it is because of our failure of imagination in the present. More than ever, you’ve got to aim for what you can’t expect to get. The marketspace of commerce has become a single global bazaar. To be a viable player in this arena, we need to develop intellectual capital skills imbued with creativity, innovation, leadership, entrepreneurship, verbal and visual literacy, collaborative teamplay, and humanity towards one another.

The workforces of the Third Millennium will require a “conceptual edge” that requires more than specialised skills and basic information. Our age demands workers able to synthesise different types of information with imagination, inventiveness, and adaptive agility. 

They must be able to exhibit dexterity in

·       Design Thinking

·       Critical Thinking

·       Creative Thinking

·       Systems Thinking

Jobs that demand expert cognition and complex communication will remain in growing demand the world over. The key to successful participation in the new global labour market is a “deep vein of creativity that is constantly renewing itself.” Once again, the fine arts bring forth the power and promise contained within them through their capacity for infinite creativity.

The world is riven by a cocktail of challenges that are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.  

Complex systems are characterised by three features:

·       they are non-linear (small inputs lead to large and unpredictable results);

·       they are open (influenced by things from outside of “itself”), and

·       they are chaos-capable (they can function in erratic, unpredictable ways at times).

In all of the above scenarios, the language of the fine arts expressed through drawing, painting, writing, sculpture, photography, music, dance, and theatre, have the force and the power to capture ideas and portray them with exquisite finesse. 

Why? Because they can tie together disparate streams of thought from diverse disciplines and synthesise them into a concise power-pack that reveals exactly the content and context under scrutiny. This is an invaluable skill in business as it eradicates perplexity: the cost of confusion is too high and the clarity rendered by art is immeasurable in real terms when applied to business thinking. 

This shift from perplexity to perspicuity leads to massive gains in business as it fosters creative collaboration, which acts as a catalyst for inventive output where original thinking rises above the chaos of the madding crowd. All of this has tremendous business value!

Thus, in all the domains of business, science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and design, we witness the need for a fine arts approach to enhance the scope and scale of each discipline. The value that emerges comes from the blend of elements where their mix of forms give rise to fresh functions that have utility in the global marketspace. This systhesis is the dance of ‘the art of science’ and ‘the science of art’.

Life is not logical; it is psychological. All art, expressed well, is imbued with epic brilliance when we are audience to the alchemy of ‘what there is’ giving birth to ‘what never was’; such is the genesis of genius. The seductive frisson that comes forth as an emergent quality has all the magic of science, technology, engineering, and maths, applied to business. All you have to do is to see the magic, and alert your consciousness to use it for the greatest good.

The kaleidoscopic approach to the arts applied to science results in a creative anarchy, which, if you are open to possibilities, reveals, through the interplay of elements,  the truth that art doesn’t play a part in the evolution of ideas; it plays the part! Why? Because it invites us to hark back to the primitive — to meet as human and human — to show the naked soul. This is where we must look if we wish to discover what moves the modern marketspace.

The equations involving art and business are manifold, but the core value within the mix is that beyond commerce, art is instrumental in enhancing the awareness of being alive! C’est la vie!