June 2, 2005

This is so exciting...Conley gets married the day after tomorrow!!

Art Watch

The entire Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago is dedicated to a new exhibition entitled "Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist's Eye."

According to the Museum, the exhibit "aims to engage viewers on many levels and heightens their awareness of what it means to be a tourist. While traveling, our mind-set changes, our senses are heightened, and passions for new experiences are aroused. We seek the extraordinary, an escape from our daily routine. As the tourist experience can alter our perception of the world and ourselves, looking at art can have this same profound effect."

Seeing the exhibition, I discovered much that was relevant to our business.

First of all, many of the most engaging images of a place are images of the unexpected. They are images or perspectives that many of us would overlook...and that's what catches our eye...seeing anew. (I remember that Cezanne said that he didn't paint what he saw, he painted what what he saw seemed to be to him.)

How often in our marketing communications are we choosing images that only show what we're communicating, rather than images that show how our customer might experience what we're communicating.

A second take-away for me related to a work by an Eastern European artist named Roman Ondak. He comes from a poor country that was part of the old Soviet Union. Although he has traveled extensively because of exhibitions of his work, his fellow countrymen are pretty much "home bound." Ondak decided to describe to various countrymen what he has seen in his travels. Then he asked them to make a work of art that represented his description.

These were not artists. They were regular folks, like you and me. So Ondak would describe - for example - the Roman Colisseum to someone and ask them to make a drawing or model of the Colisseum based upon his description.

His exhibition consisted of a large room in which he displayed many individual interpretations of many sights from around the world.

It was fascinating...because it showed how important the communications process is. If it fell down, then the monuments we all know (from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to the World Trade Center) would be egregiously misrepresented.

How clear are we, I wondered, as we communicate a strategy throughout our organization. Do we describe the strategy well enough in some kind of context? Are the individuals with whom we're communicating really picking up the true description and can they effectively communicate it to the others who must make the strategy a reality? And how do we best hone those skills??

Third, some of the exhibition was about the dislocation of travel. For example. an artist named Doug Aitken created a multi-screen video installation of people sleeping and waking in transitional spaces such as hotels and terminals. It was a vivid portrayal of the disorientation of travel and made me appreciate how important it is for our hospitality clients to identify even more ways of smoothing that transition from the familiar to the unfamiliar.

Finally, I was struck by a film piece by Matthew Buckingham in which a two-way mirror made the viewer feel you were actually in the Buckingham movie. I realized how powerful the piece was on the strength of its engaging the viewer's participation. And I thought how much more powerful our presentations, relationships, and day-to-day work can be when there is active participation among all concerned. Leave someone out and they become only passively involved. It's that simple.