The Groove Issue 56 - The Art of Finding Creative Adjacencies
Welcome to the 56th issue of The Groove.
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THE ART OF FINDING CREATIVE ADJACENCIES
Marketers, artists, authors, and anyone in the business of making an impact and building something meaningful, strive to be original and creative with what they put out in the world.
But sometimes, their art, businesses or products become stale because they spend too much time trying to milk their first success.
However, there are myriad ways not to get stuck and to continue evolving. One of them is what I call the art of finding creative adjacencies. Here are three ideas to ponder:
Look Sideways from Your Core
Marc Chagall trained as a traditional painter in Vitebsk, Saint Petersburg, and Paris. But it was working in the theater in 1911, following the mentorship of his teacher Léon Bakst, who invited him to work on the set of the Ballet Russes (a company that revolutionized ballet by envisioning it as an instrument for the convergence of music, dance, and art) that propelled Chagall into becoming a world-known artist.
This wasn’t necessarily in the province of what a traditional artist would do, but it was adjacent, and Chagall found so much fertile terrain there that he continued exploring this new nexus and excelling at it until the end of his life.
Be Open to The Possibilities That the Adjacencies May Become the Core
Marc Chagall’s sets and costumes for Firebird are still being used by the New York City Ballet, 72 years after their creation.
After moving to New York in the early 40s, Chagall got to work in super high-profile commissions, which included the stage curtain, sets, and costumes for Igor Stravinsky’s iconic ballet Firebird, which debuted at the Metropolitan Opera House in October 1945.
Chagall made more than 80 costumes for the ballet, which were celebrated and revered as his best work. The New York Herald Tribune stated that "Chagall was the hero of the evening" and “It surpasses anything Chagall has done on the easel scale, and it is a breathtaking experience, of a kind one hardly expects in the theatre.”
Chagall's paintings on the ceiling of the Opéra Garnier which have been there since 1964.
These types of adjacent projects, which back then were novel and not exactly the core of what an artist did, also brought Chagall the commission to do the ceiling for the Paris Opera (Palais Garnier) when he was 77 years old.
It took him a whole year to complete, and the final canvas was nearly 2,400 square feet and required 440 pounds of paint. After this new ceiling was unveiled in 1964, the press unanimously declared Chagall's new work to be a magnificent contribution to French culture and cemented his reputation as one of the best colorists in the world, becoming a benchmark for integrating modern art into France’s historical buildings.
After almost 60 years, that ceiling is probably Chagall’s most famous and most-seen project of his entire career.
Pay Attention to Neighboring Categories
Adjacencies can be found in the neighboring category to your work, on the edges where two or more disciplines meet and on interests that are associated with each other.
Amazon started as an online retailer which, as a business model, requires enormous scale to be successful. Eventually they allowed third-party merchants to sell on their website and later offered inventory management and fulfillment services to sellers, which led to economies of scale and bigger profits. And that was just the beginning of what the company turned itself into.
By accumulating adjacencies and blending together more and more areas next to each other, Amazon became one of the biggest and most innovative companies in the world.
Are you in any area that could benefit from expanding into different categories that are next to each other?
For example, auction houses are luring younger generations through NFTs and making it such an important part of their business because they see the possibilities of growing in brand-new territory while at the same time staying relevant.
The auction capabilities already exist, as well as the marketing machinery. What the auction houses did was adapt their systems to be able to get paid with cryptocurrencies and with that, they opened a new channel to work directly with artists in ways they normally hadn’t. All of these are adjacencies to their core business.
So what Chagall, Amazon and the auction houses are doing is encouraging you to look at ancillary events and perhaps even secondary spaces that you wouldn’t otherwise consider.
Because sometimes the answers to problems and the deepest wells of creativity live at the margins, not at the core.
Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.
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THE CURATED GROOVE
A selection of interesting articles in business, art and creativity along with some other things worth mentioning:
A neuroscientist investigation has attempted to understand where creativity emerges in the brain and why it exists in the first place.
David Hockney published an essay where he wrote that “Abstraction, I think, is now over. It’s run its course.” While his article is filled with strong points of view on art history, and even though I have always preferred figuration over abstraction, I think Hockney’s position is wrong.
I loved this thought: the emergence of institutional humility. Art museums are accepting that they are no longer exclusively ordained to control the narratives around cultural production, but instead must collaboratively engage the communities they aspire to be a part of.
The best art exhibition I saw in NYC last week.
A brilliant overview of the most conspicuous artists-pranksters-provocateurs throughout the times.
The whole story of how this apparent Caravaggio painting has European museums and collectors vying for it, is fascinating, and particularly reflected in this quote: “If you think about, What is the value of a canvas and some oil?—it’s nothing… but it’s about the creation.”