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 forget that before Star Wars, licensed merchandise was a different, less profitable business. All the big toymakers turned down the rights to make Star Wars action figures; upstart Kenner didn't sign on until a month before the film's release.'2 The Star Wars franchise opportunity's subsequent success redefined the toy industry, and continues to serve as a benchmark to this day, with annual sales in excess of $3 billion.
Artists Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Duchamp played an instrumental role in defining the characteristics of the avant-garde through their capacity to challenge not only the status quo but also the nature and purpose of art itself. Though best known as a poet, Baudelaire also worked as an influential art critic, while Duchamp moved from painting to ‘ready-mades’ before giving up ‘making art’ to play chess.
Baudelaire demonstrated the symbiotic and changing possibilities of the artist's relationship with the urban landscape and the wider social and cultural context. At the start of his career he mourns the loss of the old city: that ‘the old Paris is no more’. However, he responded enthusiastically a decade later to the new urban landscape in the dedication to his book Le Spleen de Paris:
Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.
Baudelaire defined the characteristics of the avant-garde as a way of life that was intentionally at odds with the mores of conventional society. He lived a life that would still be considered as provocative today, dressing and acting as an outsider.
Baudelaire also played a key role in establishing art as a force of disruption, by confronting traditional rules of grammar. He reframed how we understand language's metaphoric capacity, and opened up the aesthetic possibilities that lie beyond grammar's conventional frame. Much like a brand that establishes a new need by essentially discovering a latent desire, Baudelaire challenged a set of conventions that had effectively become culturally reinforced as a set of rules. In this respect, Baudelaire developed an essential maxim of disruptive behaviour: test, and then break the rules wherever they restrict innovative potential.
Compared to contemporary luminaries like Picasso, Marcel Duchamp had – publicly at least – a relatively brief career as a practising artist. However, the significance of his contribution has even more impact on art and life today than it did when he first exhibited his work. A clue to Duchamp's significance for development of the art of disruption lies in a famous quote: ‘I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.’
Duchamp challenged himself as well as the mores of his time. Although his early work largely applied the traditional craft skills that remained central to the practice of many of his avant-garde contemporaries, Duchamp appeared to realize the contradiction inherent in utilizing traditional techniques to shape the future.
The formation of Duchamp's conceptual breakthroughs clearly owes much to his interactions with the Dada movements. The approach's common interest in disruptive practice simultaneously parodied the old order while developing new aesthetic possibilities that redefined art's form and function.
Duchamp instinctively understood that the scientific approach to innovation – one where the individual achieved objectivity through incremental steps framed by pre-existing rules, or repeated laws to prove a thesis – was at odds with the process that enabled the artist to trust in his or her emotions. Duchamp proposed that:
The artist goes from intention to realisation through a chain of totally subjective reactions offer business an insight into the value of gut reaction as a valuable source of innovation opportunity. In contrast to the tendency of the ‘scientific’ approach to minimize unpredictable outcomes artists are more likely to discover unprecedented potential by trusting in chance.
Duchamp's transformation of everyday products into art works through the combination of signature and gallery display simultaneously disrupted the history of art, exhibiting, criticism, curating and collecting. His radical proposition was arguably the single most disruptive act in the history of art: ‘My idea was to choose an object that wouldn't attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see.'
The most important takeaway from Duchamp's contribution to the avant-garde is the need to challenge archetypes. This is equally true for brands, which waste so much time and money supporting tired propositions when they could be investing in game changing innovation.
The cafés of Montmartre did not just cater for artists; rather, they were part of a mix of individuals on a common endeavour to take ownership of the future. The crowd that came to cafés to converse and disrupt were inspired by the entrepreneurs, scientists and engineers who were challenging the very notion of what was possible. Gustave Eiffel's monumental Viaduc De Garabit, completed in 1884, had already signalled the potential for a new age of engineering transformation long before the Eiffel Tower opened for business in 1899. Pasteur had made the world a safer place through some extraordinary medical breakthroughs in the field of vaccination. Shopping was becoming a new form of leisure, ushering in the growth of the fashion industry as seasons emerged as a pretext for the notion of style redundancy. France had pioneered the department store concept of retailing in 1838 with the opening of Le Bon Marché.
The construction of the Eiffel Tower served as a contemporary icon to define a future-looking city. In the same way, the emergence of modern retail in Paris informed the evolution of the art of innovative branding. There was proactive serendipity between modern art and commerce as the aesthetics that emerged from café culture were quickly co-opted into the labelling and advertising of new brands.
There is a clear synchronicity between the conditions that gave way to the birth of the avant-garde in the late nineteenth century and the instability that brands
http://archive.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/1609/ff_starwarscanon?currentPage=all.
