For decades now, despite dire warnings, the field keeps expanding. Artists keep making more and more work, and most of it changes and evolves, as it should. Like the proverbial bumblebee theoretically unable to fly, arts professionals keep creating more work and finding audiences despite evidence suggesting it shouldn’t be possible. In obvious as well as subtle and even invisible ways artists change as needed to make their work and connect it to an audience. Learning is integral to this change. By definition, learning is the process of acquiring knowledge, information and experience that changes behavior.
We have long observed that the artists and arts organizations that are most healthy, balanced and productive in good economies and bad don’t wait for conditions to change in their favor, they change their own conditions through learning, creativity and invention.
While arts professionals change behaviors through learning, they change conditions by invention. For artists, invention is a natural extension of learning and the two are connected by creativity. By definition invention is the act of creating something, typically a process, device or idea. Every time an artist enters into an artistic process he/she is learning about various dimensions of the work, layers of meaning and nuance while discovering and addressing the problems of how to approach the work. So the artistic process involves creating a whole series of inventions to solve problems, make key decisions and draw new insights and meanings from collaborators and audiences.
When members of an arts community learn laterally and share, apply and build upon changes and inventions, the result can be innovation. In The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge posits that true innovation derives from a confluence and integration of inventions. Senge notes that it was 30 years between the Wright brothers’ first powered flight and the reality of commercial flight, which required a complex set of inventions (e.g. pressurized cabins, hydraulic systems, etc.) that provided the building blocks for the innovation of commercial flight and the airline industry as we know it today. Closer to the arts experience, choreographer Merce Cunningham became a celebrated innovator not through a single work but through a body of work developed over many years. Learning, lateral learning and invention can lead to innovation, which in turn can result in profound change.
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