Organizational Aesthetics

A helping handover. Opening Editorial.

2024-03-01T01:12:46-08:00

In taking up my role as Editor in Chief of Organizational Aesthetics (OA) I am reminded of some notions that shape who I am professionally and contribute to my interpretation of the role and the work ahead. They focus on ritual, evaluation, spirals, the object and metaphor of the chair.

Make music not war

2024-03-01T01:12:51-08:00

In October 2022 Netflix re-released the 1957 movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, a fictional account of the infamous Death Railway built by Allied prisoners of war in World War II. The bridge of the story was an important link that would connect Burma with Thailand, thus enabling and securing Japanese supply lines. I remember watching this as a youngster and being impressed by the heroism of the incarcerated prisoners, and their ability to withstand abusive captors and their torture.

How artists can help us perceive organisational dysfunction and broken-ness differently

2024-03-01T01:12:52-08:00

This paper considers what organizations might learn from the artist and the aesthetic devices they employ in the production of art that deals with dysfunction and broken-ness. By introducing these conditions as central to the redrawing of art’s remit following the existential crises and traumas of the 20th and 21st Centuries, it positions them as central to the critical contestation of what defines ‘functionality’ at an organisational level. From problematising the binarism of (and, consequently, the drawing of the boundary between) dysfunctional|functional and broken|fixed, I offer an organizational alternative as presented by artists. The work of German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) and Venezuelan artist Alejandra Ghersi (1989-) has been carefully selected for the insights they offer to support this task. This paper explores their re-constitution of aesthetic registers (such as harmony, beauty, rhythm, and tone) as an organizational act, and positions the resulting ‘transformative dissonance’ as metaphor for a condition of post-binary organization. By focusing on each artist’s determined non-binarism and the associated aesthetic construct of their respective work, this paper presents approaches to dysfunction and broken-ness that accept dissonance as a natural organizational phenomenon, that then, from this (dis)position of acceptance, avail themselves to the pursuit of organizational transformation.

Philosophy, art, and a glass of red wine

2024-05-20T06:47:08-07:00

As I read his latest book, I hear Pierre’s voice in my head, and I can feel – even smell – a glass of red wine in my hand. I imagine I am sitting in a comfortable living room, in the very chair where Bruno Latour was sitting the night before and I eagerly absorb what Pierre has to tell me about last night’s conversation with Bruno. And the night before that Adorno was in the living room, and the night before that, Pierre was at Andy Warhol’s factory in New York, and before that and before that, and the stories, and the ideas wash over me, even more intoxicating than the wine.

The thread that weaves throughout the book is the idea that artists these days, through their art, can curate much of our modern world. There are chapters that argue for an illustrate how art can curate knowledge, ethics, the middle class, luxury, prices, poetics, and even business education. This isn’t to say that art actually curates all of this, but rather that some art curates some of it in our world. And in that premise is the hope that artists, through their art, through their art practices, through their curation of our world, can find a better path to a better future. In short, art might be able to show us how to get from the problems that are seemingly endemic to late stage capitalism to a version of capitalism that finally uses the vast resources generated by capitalism to fully enable human flourishing.

Pierre Guillet de Monthoux Curating Capitalism – How Art Impacts Business, Management, and Economy

2024-05-20T06:43:41-07:00

Meeting with students a curator at an exhibition at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, I learned that curating is a public-making gesture, an exposing engagement and sharing that is reaching out while taking a stand towards the world, based on dialogues with all kinds of socio-material stakes and holders.
What might be understood by curating with or beyond the conventional or avant-garde understandings of curatorial work? How can doing curating work or plays offer new ways of sensing and making sense ? Can it provide new hybrid forms of art and business (and its nexus) related to our current society and economy and beyond for a different future to come?