Amy Whitaker - Art Thinking: How to Carve Out Creative Space in a World of Schedules, Budgets, and Bosses

I just want to encourage people not to wait for an ideal state of awareness. They must begin with the current means and with their mistakes.

Joseph Beuys, artist

I grew up not completely understanding what a job was. My parents had an almost peculiar passion for what they did. My father was a neurologist so enamored with his work that he numbered his ATM pin code for a protein sequence in his favorite enzyme. He skipped lunch every day because it slowed him down too much. My mother, a medievalist, skipped lunch every day of graduate school to pore over illuminated manuscripts.

Someone once asked my father how he and my mother got along so well being in such different fields. He said that he was in the business of saving lives and she was in the business of making lives worth saving. The differences between their vocations were not as great as they first appeared. The truth was, they flipped roles all the time. He helped people with quality-of-life issues like debilitating headaches or nerve damage that made it unpredictable and scary to walk. She taught people basic survival skills like how to write in complete sentences.

That idea of saving lives versus making lives worth saving describes the general relationship between literature and science in the case of my parents, and art and business in the case of this book. At first, one looks like leisure and the other necessity, one like imagination and the other analysisexcept that it is often hard to know which one is which.

On January 17, 2008, a British Airways pilot named John Coward was bringing a Boeing 777 in to land at Londons Heathrow Airport. The plane had been in the air for more than ten hours on its way back from China. In the last two minutes of the flight, within two miles of the end of a five-thousand-mile journey, the engines failed. Working swiftly with the captain who adjusted the wing flaps, Coward pulled the plane just over the perimeter fence and landed it on its belly in the grass. No one was gravely injured.

In describing the incident, the aviation expert Philip Butterworth-Hayes said the pilots were dealing with a situation for which [t]here is no training... and the instruments are of no help whatsoever. In uncharted territory, they acted in a way that was both analytic and imaginative. The 150-metric-ton aircraft is a masterpiece of technology, but to land it safely they had to negotiate the physics of flight with the more human tools of ingenuity and split-second response. As the British Airline Pilots Association said, the crew, including the cabin crew who evacuated the plane, were ordinary people who did an extraordinary thing.

THE MFA IS THE NEW MBA

Like many children of specialist parents, my siblings and I became generalists. My brother became a COO/CFO type, warm and dry-witted with a vaguely militaristic streak. Our sister went into marketing and business development. I became a jack-of-all-trades kind of person. In some other life, I might have been a scientist or a policy wonk but I became an artist instead, in the general DIY life-assembly sense.

Despite our parents different fields, ours was a household of epic and unspoken Calvinist work ethic. I had always loved to draw but found it hard to see the public service in making art. Even with the saving-lives-vs.-making-lives-worth-saving moral complexity, if elected officials had to rank-order giving money to road repair, cancer research, and art education, it wasnt hard to see which came in third.

It was easy to see the immediate need to help the sick and repair what was broken. But in the long run, art is aligned with imagination, which is aligned with the cure for cancer itself. Creativity is also behind the economic successes that make the roads possible. And the roads are worthwhile for getting places besides the beige-cubicled world. Making lives worth saving has its own claim on necessity. Art and science, leisure and work, invention and execution are all parts of the same system.

After college, I went to work in art museums because I thought they were public libraries for imagination. It turned out their inner workings were decidedly economic and I went to business school in hopes of becoming a museum manager. The plot of my life splintered in 2001, the summer after business school. Within a month, our father died suddenly, the corporate job I had taken was canceled, and 9/11 happened. A year later, I made a life decision as much as a career one and enrolled in an MFA in painting program at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

In 2004, the year I finished art school, Daniel Pink declared in the Harvard Business Review that the MFA was the new MBA. James J. Cramer wrote that Wall Street analysts should get fine art degrees so that they could, like the great modernists, spot undervalued AT&T stock before everyone else.

On the ground, the cultures were almost comically different. Business school was full of frameworks so general we could apply the same one to population control and toothpaste marketing. My navy interview suit felt so generic I taped plastic airline wings to the lapel and wore it for Halloween.