The Groove Issue 62 - The Infallible Link Between Surprise and Creativity
Welcome to the 62nd issue of The Groove.
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THE INFALLIBLE LINK BETWEEN SURPRISE AND CREATIVITY
The catchphrase “surprise and delight” seems to have a high priority in marketers’ search for sustained customer engagement.
Artists rack their heads thinking about how to keep evolving and surprising their audiences and collectors with each new body of work.
But not that many artists or companies are able to surprise their people in the right way.
Not everything that is creative is surprising. But if you can add elements of surprise to products or services that bring value, solve a problem, or engage people in an original way, you have the potential to create something truly memorable that stays in people’s minds.
A surprise is the violation of an expectation. Once you are in contact with that surprising thing, your brain reacts and your synapses fire up trying to figure out that unexpected stimulus.
The brain becomes more active after a surprise because emotions are involved. This is why creativity and surprise become so effective when mixed together and it is a phenomenon worth exploring.
Frida Kahlo, Master of The Unexpected
Frida Kahlo painting The Wounded Table ca. 1940.
This past week, Frida Kahlo, one of my art heroines, popped in my mind again when her self-portrait “Diego y Yo” (1949) sold at Sotheby’s for $35 million, shattering all records by any Latin American artist.
Frida’s life was like a story penned by a magical realist author. Truth be told she had narratives inside and around her to make a lot of astonishing work.
And what really enthralls, amazes, and grabs you is the surprise she created in her paintings. That’s the reason why you can’t stop staring, even though you have seen these pictures a million times before.
Frida Kahlo, What the Water Gave Me, 1938, mixes traditional and ancient iconography, mythology and symbolism, eroticism and botany all mapped out onto a scene depicting the legs of the artist herself (as signified by her wounded right foot) submerged in bath water.
How did she do that? Her husband Diego Rivera said it best in 1953: “...her great powers of inventive creation within a reality that remains entirely real even as it soars to a marvelous, yet logical expression of the imagination in the realm of the unexpected, where the sudden appearance of dialectical associations are as surprising as they are undeniable.”
The strangeness of Frida’s work is at the same time anchored in reality. It’s about her life - amplified, exaggerated, weird - but still real.
Frida Kalho, The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego, and Señor Xolotl, 1949.
There are no UFOs, flying cars or sci-fi elements in her art. Instead, there are pierced body parts; different countries and cultures merged in the same canvas; plants, people and buildings floating on a bathtub while she’s inside.
Being a rebel helped Frida trigger surprise in the viewers’ minds. Back then, nobody was painting what she was painting.
Add to that the rawness, emotion, and authenticity in her works, and you get the winning combo: your brain will react and recall long before you are no longer in front of her paintings, because there’s not only originality but added surprise in the mix.
You Didn’t See That Coming
Sometimes, all it takes is changing one thing to create a big surprise.
In 2017, Christie’s secured the consignment of the much-embattled Salvator Mundi, the alleged last Da Vinci painting that remained in private hands.
For decades, auction houses have categorized the artworks that they plan on selling based on their period of creation in art history. Logically, a Da Vinci painting would have belonged to the Old Masters/Renaissance auction.
But Christie’s knew that old master auctions didn’t attract the billionaires they needed to bid for Salvator Mundi. Those people were all vying for trophy pieces in the modern and contemporary auctions.
And that’s where Salvator Mundi was placed. As the centerpiece of the November contemporary sales night.
With this one move, Christie’s created a marketing stunt that people in the art world didn’t see coming.
A 600-year-old painting had a special catalogue as part of the lush package of the season and had been marketed to the right audience, the ones who could afford it, fight for it and eventually flaunt it.
The stunt paid off. The painting was sold for $450 million and it became the most expensive work of art sold at a public auction, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of news stories and even a couple of documentary films that came after.
Get Down and Dirty
It’s hard to surprise people if you don’t know your audience.
If you have been to Disneyland or Disney World, chances are that the first time you stepped inside one of those parks, you were pleasantly surprised (and delighted). There’s so much to see, so many rides, shops, attractions, restaurants, parades, characters in costumes walking around.
The way in which The Walt Disney Company operates today continues to be rooted in the same way that Walt Disney ran the company from its early days until his death in 1966.
In the recent years of Disneyland in the mid-1950s, one of Walt’s team members told him that they should build administrative offices so that the management could run the parks from there.
Walt opposed the idea vehemently and said: “I don’t want you guys sitting behind desks. I want you out in the park, watching what people are doing and finding out how you can make the place more enjoyable for them.”
On many occasions, Walt wore old clothes and a straw hat and toured the park incognito, looking for issues to fix and also for what to do to increase surprise in children’s reactions and that of their parents. He carefully watched their faces and expressions and knew that when a ride didn’t stimulate people enough, it needed an overhaul.
Next time you feel stuck and out of surprising ideas go ahead and emulate Walt’s strategy. All you have to do is spend more time watching the people you serve.
Proving The Opposite
This is a quite simple concept but one that is often overlooked: surprising people with something new may help others change their perspectives or challenge their fixed beliefs.
It doesn’t have to be the most creative thing in the world, but it has to be new to them.
How many times have you heard: “Oh, I don’t eat this type of food, or this ingredient, or that plant...”? Then those people go to a restaurant and an inventive chef uses that particular ingredient that they swore they will never eat, and that day, their expectations changed because of one single experience that surprised and delighted them.
The trick is to extend an invitation to a specific customer or audience to experience something new.
What can you come up with that is the opposite to what a certain group of people expect?
Or find a new ancillary audience that you didn’t consider before? How do you prove the contrary of a generally fixed concept?
How do you violate expectations, or even better, how do you shatter conventions and create something that really surprises people while adding value to their lives?
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:
Beware of focusing too much on data, it may hinder creative solutions.
How to get creativity flowing to eventually lead to an Eureka moment.
The pressure to succeed pollutes our creativity.
The “imaginative experience” represents the place in the human mind where science and art meet.
Best art exhibition I saw in NYC last week