there are three essential differences that inform the rationale for The Dream Café. Specifically, today there is:
• Less opportunity for face-to-face interdisciplinary and cross-cultural discourse.
• An emphasis on efficiency that has devalued conversational discourse as a social opportunity not related to business.
• Increasing displacement of up-close-and-personal engagement with online conversation.
It is clear that the ad hoc and serendipitous opportunity that cafés provided for unanticipated connections was the secret of their success. Later in the book we will spend some time introducing our methodologies, and acknowledge the debt we owe to the pioneering spirits that informed and benefitted from a culture that valued time spent in meaningful conversation.
For the time being, we want to be clear that we will never claim to be able to compress the complex mix of time, place, people and context into a three or four day experience leading to an outcome as profound as the theory of relativity or cubism. Although more modest, however, we are still capable of creating a paradigm shift. By synthesizing and prioritizing the key ingredients that allowed café culture to stir radical Innovation, we can enable our clients to let go of the rules. This will enable them to reconsider everything they formerly saw as a challenge as an opportunity for themselves and the world.
Disruptions are always likely to incite resistance. Change typically involves upsetting people who feel that their values and knowledge are being threatened by people and principles that they do not understand. Robert Hughes captured the impact of disruption in his phrase ‘the shock of the new’.
Creative individuals' ability to simultaneously respond to and drive change is a skill that many businesses today lack. The avant-garde's reputation was initially based on its capacity to challenge the status quo, and the conspicuous confidence its members displayed while doing so. While these individuals enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the dominant culture, they also had a high degree of autonomy, effectively existing and operating as a subculture. While subcultures do exist in businesses, they are often and unfortunately a dysfunctional bi-product of a lack of effective discourse between different spheres of expertise, and/or management. The most obvious and most typical example of the battle between the quest for efficiency and the need for innovation is demonstrated by businesses that invest in efficiency enablers like ‘Six Sigma’ – only to find their innovation outcomes declining.
Bureaucracy has a tendency to prioritize processes that deliver predictable outcomes at the expense of ad hoc creativity. American multi-national conglomerate corporation 3M – a business that had built a reputation for innovation – saw a 9 percent fall in revenue from new products as a result of an efficiency (Six Sigma) strategy introduced in 2001. Although the drive for efficiency did achieve significant savings in manufacturing costs and other areas where people could be replaced by technology, it restricted the opportunity for unpredictable cross-cultural fertilization, which had flourished previously. The solution implemented in 2005 involved setting up teams, deliberately composed of people with different discipline expertise, who were given the freedom to operate outside of the Six Sigma regime. By 2010 innovation income was back up to 30 percent and rising.
Pivotal Locations
Art is frequently profiled as a solitary activity that emerges from a context of personal deprivation. Yet its history reveals another level of engagement focused on conviviality and discourse between different disciplines. The Black Cat in Montmartre was an iconic location that allowed artists and other creative dreamers to meet in an environment with which they could identify as a symbol of rebellion and otherness. The heady mix of food, drink and entertainment established The Black Cat as an engine of cultural revolution. It united different classes and interest groups in a place where they mixed freely and gained confidence in a world where rules matter less than ideas.
Dream Cafés
Picasso and others arrived in Paris too late to frequent The Black Cat, which closed in 1887. However, they sought out and founded their own equivalents. It is clear that food, drink and live entertainment facilitated and encouraged intellectual and artistic exchange. Development also played an important role in forming this culture of disruption. As Roger Shattuck confirms, in his illuminating history of the ‘banquet years’, creative practitioners and their patrons created their own banquets to deliberately foster opportunity for creative exchange and inspiration.
Context
Paris in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century became an important location for retail businesses focused on experience. As a result of the unprecedented explosion of entrepreneurial ambition, Paris became a world centre that attracted all types of cultural creatives. Revolutionary and iconic structures like the Arcades and the Eiffel Tower, together with the cabarets and cafés, helped to create an impression that Paris was the centre of the universe for fostering challenging and provocative ideas. The fact that many of the artists who became leading figures of the modern movement were attracted by this mythology, and then went on to actualize the myths, is an important factor in the creation of this self-fulfilling prophecy.
Investment
While many artists did indeed starve, Paris became a centre for the patronage and commoditization of culture that served to attract artists, audiences and investors. In many respects the modus operandi of the art investors who monetized the avant-garde is similar to the enlightened risk takers that grow disruptive businesses by aligning investment with ideas on the basis of instinct rather than precedent.
Style
Paris took the lead as a location for style and fashion in particular during this period. Along with the creation of the haute couture business of high-end fashion houses, Paris became a centre for the Dandy; and the Flaneur, bohemian style allowed artists and their followers to dress the part and gain recognition and sense of significance. This was a lesson that David Ogilvy, the Englishman who had a huge impact on the development of American advertising during the 1950s and 1960s, clearly absorbed. Many regard Ogilvy as the creator of the style and strategy of modern advertising; and he freely acknowledged that he used his penchant for distinctive sartorial style (including wearing kilts in Madison Avenue) as a means of drawing attention to his agency: ‘if you can't advertise yourself, what hope do you have of advertising anything else?'
Paris became a blueprint for later cultural revolutions in which style and content played respective roles in reinforcing a sense of intentional and confident difference.
Critical Engagement
Paris attracted almost as many theorists and critics as it did creators, which helped develop a context for promoting, debating and evolving ideas. The twenty-first century seems to be full of theorists and critics who use others' creative endeavours as a platform for assuming ownership of art instead of working in the spirit of co-creation to evolve a constructive synergy between practice and theory.
Unquestioning obedience to tradition is the only thing keeping you from a more remarkable future. Considering the context that produced this work – and the mind-sets of the artists that created it – offers a useful introduction to the origins, characteristics and implications of disruption. The first phase of the avant-garde involved significant levels of daring innovation. However, the environment of conventional wisdom, risk-averse control and formulaic solutions that informed it is alive and well to this day. Responses to this context of constant change became a recurring source of the avant-garde's work. It is what enabled them to develop metaphors and new conceptual opportunities, which encouraged a reframing of the ways that we understood our relationship with the world.
It would be
