We learned that scientific rigour provides a safety net of predictability – which has encouraged us to ignore the fact that the best science is very similar to the best art. As Einstein confirmed:
Imagination is more important than knowledge … When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come close to the conclusion that the gift of imagination has meant more to me than any talent for absorbing absolute knowledge.
Businesses and institutions generally take a cautious approach to innovation. In comparison, the avant-garde reveals evidence that chaos can be a source of sustainable innovation. Chaos is indeed a fix for the creatively inclined, an opportunity in which a mantra of ‘if it's not broken, break it' feeds our inquisitive minds, sustains the soul and inspires our dreams.
This inquisitive, risk-friendly approach enables the more creative of us to discover and sow the seeds of possibility beyond the edge of what we thought we knew, or could accept. The story of modern culture is one of disruption; throughout this book we reference the writers, poets, performers, makers, musicians and artists that have stretched and ultimately shaped our aesthetic and conceptual sensibilities. We have given priority to practitioners who have challenged rather than conformed to the status quo. It is also a story of an on-going relationship between the arts and big business that can be characterized by the words ‘mutual dependency’.
History shows us that the divisions that now segregate the arts from business are a relatively recent phenomenon. A brief examination of the cultural response to the early phases of industrialization confirms that resistance to the emergence of the new was coupled with its critical co-option. This tendency for synergetic and catalytic engagement still lies at the root of cultural invention.
The Dream Café will encourage you to challenge the prejudices that have led you to believe disruption is only possible if you have the freedom from fiscal responsibility that artists appear to enjoy. We argue that the open minded and inquisitive approach typical of avant-garde practice will enable you to realize the kinds of opportunities for hybridization that the closed minded resist.
Gaining access to a more diverse landscape of possibilities is all about culture change rather than the absence of latent ability. Gaining access to The Dream Café is simply about deciding to enter.
Throughout the book, we will encourage you to work closer to the edge and will help you to understand that creating brands like an artist doesn't always depend on achieving total originality. Many of the lessons that we reveal suggest that there is a lot to be gained by re-imagining and re-assembling pre-existing components drawn for a variety of sources.
What follows is an A to Z of the attitudes and techniques that enabled the avant-garde to reshape our sense of what is possible.
A
AVANT-GARDE
The origins of The Dream Café's philosophy and processes are firmly rooted in an approach to the art of radical innovation, w'hich started with café conversations. The informality of the café encouraged the development of interdisciplinary and transcultural discourses that led to a clear pattern of beliefs, practices and lifestyle habits that gave rise to the term ‘avant-garde’, which initially became clearly visible in France in the 1880s.
The coffee house forged the principles of the café as a fermenting pot for revolution during the eighteenth century. This meeting place informed unprecedented scientific breakthroughs and the industrialization of manufacturing. However, its impact on the arts did not achieve the same level of radical conceptual experimentation that occurred in France in the latter half of the nineteenth century and beyond.
The term avant-garde came into use in the early twentieth century, and was used to define a shift in emphasis from classical dependency to experimental challenge in which artist and other intellectuals redefined the parameter of the known, and effectively acted as the vanguard of modernity. Cafés became the catalyst and a crucial source of facilitation for a whole new way of thinking and doing that was fuelled by interdisciplinary and multi-cultural moments of connectivity around café tables.
We focus this brief introduction on the formative phase of the avant-garde (c. 1850s–1920s) including ‘The Belle Époque’ (beautiful period).
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, France – and Paris in particular – provided a heady context of revolution as volatile politics and energetic entrepreneurship combined to shape opportunity for innovation. Those parts of Paris that have become the major tourist attractions today were created during the 1850s through a process of massive urban disruption, which ripped out and built over the medieval core of the old city in less than a decade. Masterminded and managed by Baron Haussmann, the new Paris became the blueprint for the modern city. It created unprecedented social and economic opportunities that redefined how many people experienced urban life.
The artists, musicians, writers, poets, critics, designers and craftspeople who flocked to the city in this period of ferment were inspired and facilitated by a context in which unprecedented developments in science, technology, retail, entertainment and transport were emerging. While city dwellers had to accept tumult as a significant characteristic of contemporary life, the avant-garde embraced this flux as a source of inspiration and opportunity. The impact that the café had on intellectual and creative life is captured by the words of Irish novelist George Moore, in his book Confessions of a Young Man, published just after the turn of the century:
I did not go to either Oxford or Cambridge, but I went to La Nouvelle Athènes É though unacknowledged, though unknown, the influence of the Nouvelle Athènes is inveterate in the artistic thought of the nineteenth century.
This urban upheaval acted as a magnet for artists and other experimentally inclined practitioners and theorists. Their desire to be where the action was led them to reinforce the development of an infrastructure that supported a bohemian lifestyle. New kinds of entertainment emerged, and benefitted financially by enabling the inquisitive access to its less orthodox customers. The infamous Black Cat Café (Le Chat Noir) in Montmartre, established in 1881, provided the blueprint for the decadent mix of cabaret, food and alcohol that fuelled the avant-garde. Montmartre was on the fault-line of the upheaval that reshaped Paris. Its mix of affordable rooms, galleries, cafés and brothels provided the context in which to found the Society of Incoherent Arts – arguably the first example of a deliberate concern to disrupt established notions of form and function in the arts.
By the start of the twentieth century, Paris had become renowned as a centre for disruptive experiments in art, lifestyle and culture. The kind of stimulating nurturing and facilitating context that it provided was essential for provoking and sustaining disruption. France was managing to encourage a process of reciprocation in which cultural innovation was inspired by the context of urban change, while helping to translate and define it.
The development of an avant-garde culture depended on the interaction between different personalities, stimuli and motivations. However, the courage to defy convention informed the evolution, and subsequently the influence, of the key practitioners who continue to give meaning to the term.
One of the most important characteristics of the avant-garde is the refusal to heed when the gatekeepers say no. Being a pathfinder can be difficult, and requires people with an ability to override rejection. An avant-garde business is going to need to be confident and resilient to translate rejection into success. Fortunately, the history of innovation is littered with case studies of businesses that hung in there – and ended up owning the future.
One classic example of this is the problems that filmmaker George Lucas encountered in his attempts to sell his concept of a franchise for toys relating to the first Star Wars film. This was art trying to convert to business; according to Wired Magazine editor Chris Baker ‘It's easy to