The Groove Issue 75 - Why Cross-Pollination is a Fertile Ground for Creativity
WHY CROSS-POLLINATION IS FERTILE GROUND FOR CREATIVITY
Hello from Oxford, Mississippi! I am here at the University of Mississippi because tonight I will give a TEDx talk on how artists and creatives invent the future. When the video becomes available in one month, I will add a link to this newsletter.
Also, make sure to check below all the exciting events coming up!
Today, I’m giving you a tight excerpt of my upcoming book “How Creativity Rules The World: The Art and Business of Turning Your Ideas Into Gold” (HarperCollins).
I have condensed a full chapter into a handful of paragraphs below.
At the end of every chapter, there is an Alchemy Lab section so you can take actionable steps from what you’ve learned in that chapter and adapt them to your life. I have also condensed one here for you.
The Alchemy of Science and Art: Gold
The Old Burgtheater, an early gouache on paper by Gustav Klimt, 1888-1889.
For the first ten years of his career as an artist, Gustav Klimt painted portraits and landscapes in a conservative traditional European style. He also decorated museums and theatres in his natal Vienna. While he had a great talent, nothing was out of the ordinary or innovative in his work.
That changed in 1900, when one of Klimt’s supporters and patrons, an Austrian woman named Bertha Szeps, who collected art and led an important salon that Klimt attended frequently, introduced him to her new husband, Hungarian anatomist Emil Zuckerkandl.
Zuckerkandl tutored Klimt in biology and gave lectures and seminars arranged by Klimt. Zuckerkandl projected slides of microscopic tissue, cells, and human eggs. He explained how these eggs, when fertilized, became fetuses and eventually humans. This fascinated Klimt and permeated his art for the following decade.
Klimt in Vienna in 1917.
One of the assignments Zuckerkandl gave Klimt was to read Darwin’s 1859 book On Origin of Species. Klimt was impressed with Darwin’s theories and the science-based conversations he had with Zuckerkandl. His paintings started to reflect new themes and hidden meanings.
He became obsessed with understanding humans biologically the way Darwin did. In 1903, he traveled to Ravenna, Italy. There the Byzantine architecture of Italian churches, their interiors decorated with luminous golden mosaics, influenced him. The combination of biological symbols and gold leaf in his paintings marked the beginning of Klimt’s famous and financially successful “Golden Phase.”
Klimt innovated in the arts by using this cross-fertilization of diverse disciplines—art, science, and decorative references—in a way not commonly used back then. As a result, Klimt became the leader of the new modernist movement in Vienna.
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (also called The Lady in Gold or The Woman in Gold) by Gustav Klimt, completed between 1903 and 1907, is the masterpiece achieved through Klimt’s cross-fertilization.
In 2006, art collector and Estée Lauder’s son Ronald Lauder paid $135 million for Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (also called The Lady in Gold), which Klimt started painting in 1903 and finished in 1907.
What most people don’t know is the iconography of Adele Bloch-Bauer’s ornate dress. It is composed of complex symbols: rectangles for sperm and ovals for eggs. As art historian Emily Braun puts it, “These biologically inspired symbols are designed to match the sitter’s seductive face to her full-blown reproductive capabilities.”
Mixing Intellectual Capital: A Key to Innovation
The wearable technology market was valued at $116 billion in 2021. It is one of the most innovative fields that sprang out of cross-fertilization. Starting in the 1960s with rudimentary computers strapped around the waist, wearable tech didn’t advance much until Finnish company Polar launched the first wire-free heart monitor in 1982. Invented at the intersection of medical equipment, science, industrial design, and technology, Polar became the go-to brand for anyone who wanted to monitor their heart rate, speed, effort, distance, and other variables while exercising or practicing sports.
Polar dominated the wearable-tech-for-fitness market until 2007, when Fitbit, a company based in San Francisco, started selling clippable trackers that measured the steps, distance, calories burned, and sleep cycles of the people who wore it 24/7. In 2013, Fitbit launched their first wrist-worn tracker. In 2019 Google announced that it would buy the company for $2 billion.
In 2014, Apple upped the ante. It released the Apple Watch, whose newest versions can get messages and notifications, play music, track workouts, warn of abnormal heart rates, take electrocardiograms, among many other things. Sony, Adidas, and Samsung followed Apple, releasing their own sleek smart watches.
Cross-pollination is attainable when artists and entrepreneurs are humble enough and have the presence of mind to know that they can’t possibly know everything. Avoiding the mentality that things have to be self-contained and “pure” allows us to invite the perspective of others who can add an expansive dimension to ours.
Alchemy Lab
• When artists and entrepreneurs take concepts, ideas, and techniques from separate fields and blend them, magical things can happen. This also is the way life is—multiple realms colliding through cross-pollination.
• If you want to cross-pollinate, follow these steps:
1. List your strengths and areas of competence.
2. Identify the second and/or third different fields in which you need to develop expertise. The depth of competence can vary significantly depending on what it is you want to do. Consider the integrative structure of the product, company, or service that will be developed from cross-pollinating. Be flexible, dynamic, and fluid, whether you are working alone or in a team. This is the fundamental characteristic of cross-pollination and is the only way it can lead to fruitful outcomes.
3. Pay attention to the process. Accidents and unintended consequences can bring myriad creative discoveries that weren’t seen from the outset.
Thank you again for the incredible response to my book! We are only three weeks away from launch date and I can’t wait for you to have it in your hands!
From now on the bonuses will only be available to those who preorder the HARDCOVER format.
Get it from Amazon, B&N or your favorite independent bookstore and claim FREE immediate access to my creativity online course broken down into practical modules, videos and PDFs to go at your own pace.
Additionally, you also get exclusive bonuses valued at $350.
Plus access to the monthly group Zoom calls which are priceless!
This program is guaranteed to spark a creative breakthrough in you, no matter what you do.
Read the many breakthroughs that past participants have experienced here.
All you have to do is send your purchase confirmation to book@mariabrito.com and you will be in.
All details are here.
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
For all these upcoming book-tour events, I am going to be giving a workshop instead of a book reading. I am all for giving you value and content that can enrich your lives and careers. You will be experiencing a version of my keynote speech that I give in companies.
Remember that by buying tickets to these events you will benefit the independent bookstores, these are the ones that keep the magic happening! Choose your favorite and come hang out with me!
The capacity of both in-person and online events is limited, please secure yours now.
The ONLY in-person event will be at The Strand in New York on Monday, March 14 at 7:00 pm EST – I would absolutely LOVE to see you there! Tickets here.
Next stop is virtual on Wednesday, March 16 at 6:00 pm PST (9:00 pm EST) with the extraordinary Book Soup in LA. One of the most iconic bookstores in California! I am bringing my Angeleno friend Josh Spector with me that night. Josh is one of the most creative and sharpest people I’ve ever met. A veteran of content creation, he was the director of social media for the Academy Awards for many years and today he helps thousands of creators and entrepreneurs with his courses and materials in “For the Interested”. Tickets here.
Then I go online again on Thursday, March 17 at 6:00 pm EST with The Lit Bar– a fabulous bookstore in the Bronx, NY owned by Noëlle Santos, and I am bringing a special guest with me: the incomparable June Ambrose, a visionary who shaped the style of hip-hop in the 90s, became Jay Z’s stylist in the 2000s and is now the creative director of Puma. Tickets here.
My final online stop is in sunny Miami on Tuesday, March 22 at 7 pm with Books & Books, the celebrated and super special bookstore that has several locations all over Florida. That day I will be joined by my dear friend Carlos Betancourt, a multidisciplinary artist who has lived in Miami most of his life and has been instrumental in shaping the art scene of that city for many decades. His work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Met New York, the New Orleans Museum of Art, The Bass and the PAMM in Miami Florida and many more. Tickets here.
THE CURATED GROOVE
A selection of interesting articles in business, art and creativity along with some other things worth mentioning:
The Quest to Make a Digital Replica of Your Brain.
25 Mysterious Basquiats Come Under the Magnifying Glass.
What’s So Hard About Understanding Consciousness?
What does your music taste say about you?