The Art Firm

This title explores the seemingly unorthodox alliance of the arts, management and marketing. Art firms - as avant-garde enterprises and arts corporations - have existed for at least 200 years, using texts, images and other types of art to create corporate wealth. The book investigates how to apply the methods artists use in creating value to the methods more traditional managers use in running their businesses. Guillet de Monthoux offers a crash course in aesthetics from Kant to Gadamer, showing how aesthetic management and metaphysical marketing can create value. Using case studies of successful art managers from Richard Wagner to Robert Wilson, the author illustrates the creative role - so central to value-making in contemporary economies - performed by aesthetic play in art firms. Along the way, Guillet de Monthoux points out how responsible aesthetic management and marketing can eradicate the problems of banality and totality, the two capital sins of an art-based economy.