The Groove Issue 111 - Three Proven Steps to Selling New Ideas
THREE PROVEN STEPS TO SELLING NEW IDEAS
You already know that creativity is coming up with unique ideas of value that can be materialized.
But a big part of creativity is convincing your boss, customers, collectors, investors, and partners that your great idea is worth buying into.
For several decades, researchers classified their studies around creativity on what has been called “the four Ps”: person, process, place, and product. But in 1992, Dean Keith Simonton from UC Davis added “persuasion” to the mix, successfully arguing that creative people change the way we think because they can convince us that we need what they are selling us, whether that is an ideology, a product, or a service.
You can have the best ideas in the world, but without execution and an audience you can sway your way, they are most likely to perish.
Here are three lessons unearthed from the extraordinary influence and creativity of Hilla Rebay, who was instrumental in building and hosting the collection of the Guggenheim Museum.
1. Dare to Go with What Only You See
Hilla Rebay in New York in 1935.
Sometimes selling the future can be hard, but once you find the right audience to persuade, the rewards can bring enormous dividends.
Born of a German family of titles, albeit with no money, Rebay moved to New York in 1927 to pursue a career as an artist. At first, she supported herself by painting portrait commissions, giving art lessons to aspiring artists and showing her work in galleries.
In one of those shows, Irene Guggenheim bought two of Rebay’s paintings and, intrigued by her style, hired her to create a commissioned portrait of her husband, the mega wealthy businessman Solomon R. Guggenheim. The Guggenheims were very much into buying figurative paintings, especially from old masters, and less so from the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist period.
The time that Guggenheim and Rebay spent together during the portrait-making sessions was also used by Rebay to show him the works she had been buying for herself in Europe.
She focused on articulating the ideas of spirituality, universal connection to nonrepresentational forms, and in short, made sure to interest this man in becoming a pioneer collector in a style where almost nobody had shown any interest in New York.
This was such a tipping point, as Rebay was young, fun, smart and intimately connected to the European artists who were working on the new, then-called “non-objective art”, which to Guggenheim was a complete revelation.
2. Build Confidence by Showing Your Expertise
Rebay in her studio at Franton Court, Greens Farms, Connecticut in 1946.
It’s going to be hard to align people to your vision if you aren’t a true expert in what you are trying to sell.
Rebay was both an artist who painted figurative and abstract work and someone with the right connections to artists and dealers, particularly in Paris, to make moves to impress and excite Guggenheim.
Once the initial rapport and the fresh enthusiasm of the new style of art-collecting had been planted in Guggenheim’s mind, Rebay convinced him to start buying abstract art, with her acting as his advisor. A first trip to Europe was planned.
During that trip, Rebay introduced Guggenheim to many artists and their circles. He was fascinated by their ideas and got more engrossed and interested in building something of importance that had no parallels in the United States.
Starting there and then, Rebay was given carte blanche to buy the initial works in the collection: Picasso, Chagall, Kandinsky, Leger, Delaunay and Klee.
3. Keep Expanding the Vision and Pushing for More
Frank Lloyd Wright, Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York in 1947.
People can get quickly bored even of the best ideas. Novelty wears off after a while. That’s why growth and expansion are always tools in the repertoire of creative people. Especially if you have the backers to make it as grandiose as the vision that Rebay sold to Guggenheim. She had both the intuition and the logical skills to know that her next move was to persuade him to build a museum to make his collection available to the public.
Having studied the lives of other great collectors who cemented their legacies by creating institutions like Isabella Stewart Gardner and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Rebay got Guggenheim to agree to open the Museum of Non-objective Painting and Art of Tomorrow at a temporary location on 24 East 54th Street in Manhattan, where she was the motor behind its incorporation and naturally its first director too.
Guggenheim was 100% faithful to Rebay’s vision, and while some people say that they had become lovers, it has been impossible to prove. What came after were the most decisive conversations between the two, which culminated with Guggenheim giving her the freedom to find the right architect and to pursue their common vision to build the perfect permanent home for his pioneering collection.
Rebay had heard of Frank Lloyd Wright but had never met him, so in 1943 once again, using the power of her persuasion to convince the most influential architect in the United States to build “a temple and a monument” - something that had never been done before - and to work in a city (Lloyd Wright hated cities and avoided taking projects in them), she wrote him a letter so irresistible that made him call her on the phone right away.
In that call, Rebay told Lloyd Wright that she wanted “a museum that goes slowly up, no staircase, no interruptions,” to house the many thousands of artworks that by then Guggenheim had amassed under her direction.
From then on, Rebay used her indefatigable energy to get the museum out of maquettes and blueprints into a reality. She even had control over choosing the site that Guggenheim acquired on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
By the time the museum opened in 1959, after several delays caused by WWII, cost of materials and changes in the original plans, Lloyd Wright and Guggenheim were dead, and slowly but surely, Rebay had lost power and influence within the museum and was eventually edged out.
In spite of that, this isn’t a story of failures and regrets. On the contrary, Rebay was so persuasive that she got her most important goals accomplished: a robust collection of formidable abstract artists, the iconic one-of-a-kind Fifth Avenue building, and a place in history as an incredible visionary whose convincing powers left a legacy worth celebrating and emulating.
UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVE GENIUS
I’ve put together a free webinar for those of you who are not members of my online course, Jumpstart.
If you’d like to watch it, please register here (it’s on auto-repeat every 15 minutes once you have registered).
HOW CREATIVITY RULES THE WORLD
I am super thrilled that my book won the International Book Award in the Business/Entrepreneurship category!
It’s in three formats: hardcover, eBook and audiobook.
TEDX TALK
Have you already watched my TEDx Talk: “NFTs, Graffiti and Sedition: How Artists Invent The Future”?
I share three lessons I have learned from artists that always work for anyone in their careers. Watch it here.