Stories and anecdotes from artists and how they can or have affected how people have conducted business
I got the idea to take the next step and compile various anecdotes about how artists either directly managed their business or indirectly altered other business practices after observing that author Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, unlike other “business” books I have read, very often references tales of artists and other cultural figures as demonstrators of the laws he details. He, also, often cites The Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari who recounts many tales of artist dealings with patrons in Renaissance Italy. Finally, I cam across a Twitter thread by Trung Phan where they cite how Steve Jobs used a series of Picasso lithographs, The Bull, that gradually deconstructed a bull’s form to its most essential shapes as the core model for the simplification of the iconic Apple design. I do not know the sources for the thread, however.
Further, I will resist the urge to analyze the connection and simply allow you to prance in the meadow between anecdotes and highlight the inherent value of art and culture in our society besides the literal transformation of visits and sales into money.
I want to start this series of posts with the Steve Jobs example as he very overtly aligns his vision with those of artists. In this case, the bull’s reduction to the minimal viable information for communication inspired the minimal necessary design for products of one of the most successful and valuable companies in the history of man.
[Photo: “Pasadena, Norton Simon Museum, Picasso P. The Bull, 1946” by Vahe Martirosyan is licensed under CC BY – SA 2.0]
This 2014 New York Times reveal about the secretive Apple University methods appears to initiate this discussion about Jobs and The Bull outside of the voluntary courses.
The essence of the lesson is focus: simplicity and efficient communication. Poetry.
I immediately take out of this short video a humanization through emotion of something as seemingly sterile as computers and technology. For me, focus and simplicity arrives second because it only inspires me to simplify through the initial emotional appeal (“affecting lives”).
