An excellent documentary by Heinz Peter Schwerfel, “The world according to Anish Kapoor” lets the artist talk about his impressive and intriguing sculptures. Last night when the ‘Ars Longa’ art circle of Son en Breughel replayed the documentary, it struck me that it was as if you hear a silicon entrepeneur talk about his start-up’s business approach.
“The studio is a place of experimentation. So what I want to do is fail, and fail often, fail fast.Not to take months or years to fail at something, that’s terrible. I want to go through ideas as quickly as possible and fail at them if they have to, but fail fast.”
Compare that to what Steven Johnson has to say in “Where good ideas come from”: “It’s no accident that one of the mantras of the Web startup world is fail faster. It’s not that mistakes are the goal— they’re still mistakes, after all, which is why you want to get through them quickly. But those mistakes are an inevitable step on the path to true innovation.”
Or take Tina Seelig, Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program: “The secret sauce of Silicon Valley is failure. To develop more successes, entrepreneurs have got to take a risk. Venture capitalists fund risk and, by association, failure, in order to find the “hits” in the haystack. Failure is a perfectly acceptable part of the entrepreneurial process, provided that the smart entrepreneur learns from their errors along the way.”
Kapoor’s risk taking can’t be denied. His Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago was estimated to cost $ 6M, but came out at $ 23M and it wasn’t publicly funded, that’s all individual & corporate donations. (of which $ 3M came from the opening’s gala diner)
And …”Kapoor’s contract states that the constructed piece should be expected to survive for 1,000 years.
The entrepreneurial artist is a collateral effect of the economic crisis, as new courses, institutes, and a European Commission report testify. \So if that’s what you aspire, take a look at the rest of this site and find that I have the required skills and experience to teach and assist you in becoming an entrepreneurial arist. And as for fees: I’m entrepreneurial too and ready to be paid in paintings or sculptures – that’s my business risk and incentive for success.
Oh. by the way, let’s go back to Anish Kapoor for one moment. In 2006 he delivered another great sculpture, and which nicely fits one of my themes: Here’s Anish Kapoor’s S curve
