The Groove Issue 58 - Three Takeaways from The Act of Creative Destruction
THREE TAKEAWAYS FROM THE ACT OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION
The word “disruption,” which nowadays is intimately related to creativity, innovation and people who successfully challenge the status quo, comes from the Latin “disrumpere,” which meant to break apart.
Disruption is to some extent a form of creative destruction: whether you're an entrepreneur, a manager, or an artist, you can always decide to break up with something that no longer works and start anew from scratch or reassemble the pieces that have been taken apart and discard those that aren’t needed.
How John Baldessari Disrupted Himself
John Baldessari photographed by Albrecht Fuchs in Los Angeles in 2004.
If you’ve been grappling with the idea of getting rid of something at work that no longer makes you happy, sometimes creating a ritual around that transition can facilitate the end. A bit of humor and excitement about what the future could bring helps too.
It was a hot July in 1970 in San Diego, California, when the legendary John Baldessari gathered some friends and a few of his own students to drive to the local mortuary to burn all the paintings he had made between 1953 and 1966.
In the span of twenty minutes, 13 years of work were reduced to ashes, which Baldessari had solemnly stored in ten cardboard boxes. Baldessari, who always incorporated humor in his work, years later baked cookies with some of the ashes too.
John Baldessari devised and executed the “Cremation Project” where 123 of his abstract paintings were burnt in a San Diego mortuary and reduced to ashes.
This radical act marked the end of Baldessari’s formative years as a painter and opened the door for his breakthrough years as a conceptual artist.
He had some plaques made, documented the process with photos and short films and named the whole thing the “Cremation Project.” (Leave it to a smart artist to come up with witty titles for their work.)
Honor Your Desires and Circumstances
John Baldessari’s installation Hope (Blue) Supported by a Bed of Oranges (Life): Amid a Context of Allusions, 1991 at the Tate in London. This is the type of work that emerged after the Cremation Project.
You may be wondering, why would anyone do such a thing? Baldessari’s motifs were both therapeutic and practical: he wanted to break up with the past and had 123 abstract paintings in his studio, which were reminding him that he had worked on things that he despised and had nothing to do with his practice anymore.
Moreover, he had gotten a job teaching in San Diego, which meant that he had to leave his large studio in LA and restart his practice with a quarter of the space he had.
After the Cremation Project, Baldessari got fully immersed in areas that until then he had been just tinkering with: photography, film, print, installation, sculptures and objects. This was the beginning of a wildly successful and celebrated career that lasted for almost 50 years after the day he destroyed his paintings.
Baldessari is teaching us to not be afraid to make a clean break with the past. You may not have paintings to burn, but if you need to wipe something out in your business or practice that isn’t performing, allow yourself to get rid of it and open the space for creativity to flow.
Reassembling What Has Been Done Before
Creative destruction from the angle of business and technology brings disruptive companies to the forefront. They pretty much break or radically transform how a business has been done for a certain period of time. But they don’t start from scratch. They reassemble and optimize what has been done before.
For example, Netflix, considered by many one of the most innovative companies of all time, destroyed Blockbuster and any other place where people rented movies stored in physical objects like DVDs or VHS tapes.
Netflix also made companies like Amazon, Apple and Disney invest billions of dollars to come up with their own streaming platforms and pushed traditional cable TV stations to rethink their entire businesses too.
But how did Netflix do this? In a nutshell: the founders were paying attention to outdated systems and were looking to make the customer the king of the experience. No more crazy penalties or hefty fees for being late, no more driving from one place to another to get the movie you want, only to end up with damaged tapes or scratched discs.
You know the maxim: what worked then, won’t work now. For some reason, the original Netflix competitors didn’t see all these changes coming, although they were so evident had they only been paying attention.
By creating original compelling content, analyzing data, embracing every technological innovation that is relevant to them, making the customer the most important person in the business equation, offering low subscription prices and allowing them to watch the content in any way they wanted, Netflix toppled every other paid television model that existed before.
These moves allowed them to gain 210 million loyal subscribers, win thousands of awards, partner with hundreds of exciting production companies and penetrate the markets of 190 countries around the world.
Netflix isn’t chilling either, their leaders are very much getting into gaming and designing metaverse experiences for their customers. Because you must constantly adjust the course of what you are doing to meet your people where they are.
The pattern of creation-destruction-creation is nothing but a reminder of the cycle of life itself.
Like Baldessari said: “to be creative you have to have destruction quite often too… it’s like the idea of a phoenix rising from the ashes”.
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:
The famous Dali lips sofa raises interesting questions about the authorship of artistic works.
The life of a 21st-century activist artist is more-or-less like this: their work is as likely to be exhibited at an international human rights tribunal as it is a museum, and death threats and cyberattacks are all in a day’s work.
Best art exhibition I saw in NYC last week
Picasso lived his entire life in France under surveillance.
This is alarming: The quality of deepfakes is increasing fast, and it is clear that even the most complex deepfake tools will be as easy to use as Instagram filters in the very near future.
Virtual museums have changed the status quo. After all, the internet is probably one of the most powerful public spaces we have, makes art accessible and brings people together.
This article says what I’ve always advocated for, innovation doesn’t belong just to tech or science, innovation is every human’s ability to make things better, to upgrade and improve what exists.
Remember Ai-Da the robot artist? “She” was held by airport security officers in Egypt fearing “she” could be a spy.