The Dream Cafe. Bruce Duncan

was a different, less profitable business. All the big toymakers turned down the rights to make Star Wars action figures; upstart Kenner didn't sign on until a month before the film's release.'2 The Star Wars franchise opportunity's subsequent success redefined the toy industry, and continues to serve as a benchmark to this day, with annual sales in excess of $3 billion.

How Artists do Avant-Garde

      Artists Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Duchamp played an instrumental role in defining the characteristics of the avant-garde through their capacity to challenge not only the status quo but also the nature and purpose of art itself. Though best known as a poet, Baudelaire also worked as an influential art critic, while Duchamp moved from painting to ‘ready-mades’ before giving up ‘making art’ to play chess.

      Baudelaire demonstrated the symbiotic and changing possibilities of the artist's relationship with the urban landscape and the wider social and cultural context. At the start of his career he mourns the loss of the old city: that ‘the old Paris is no more’. However, he responded enthusiastically a decade later to the new urban landscape in the dedication to his book Le Spleen de Paris:

      Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.

(Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris, 1869)

      Baudelaire defined the characteristics of the avant-garde as a way of life that was intentionally at odds with the mores of conventional society. He lived a life that would still be considered as provocative today, dressing and acting as an outsider.

      Baudelaire also played a key role in establishing art as a force of disruption, by confronting traditional rules of grammar. He reframed how we understand language's metaphoric capacity, and opened up the aesthetic possibilities that lie beyond grammar's conventional frame. Much like a brand that establishes a new need by essentially discovering a latent desire, Baudelaire challenged a set of conventions that had effectively become culturally reinforced as a set of rules. In this respect, Baudelaire developed an essential maxim of disruptive behaviour: test, and then break the rules wherever they restrict innovative potential.

      Compared to contemporary luminaries like Picasso, Marcel Duchamp had – publicly at least – a relatively brief career as a practising artist. However, the significance of his contribution has even more impact on art and life today than it did when he first exhibited his work. A clue to Duchamp's significance for development of the art of disruption lies in a famous quote: ‘I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.’

      Duchamp challenged himself as well as the mores of his time. Although his early work largely applied the traditional craft skills that remained central to the practice of many of his avant-garde contemporaries, Duchamp appeared to realize the contradiction inherent in utilizing traditional techniques to shape the future.

      The formation of Duchamp's conceptual breakthroughs clearly owes much to his interactions with the Dada movements. The approach's common interest in disruptive practice simultaneously parodied the old order while developing new aesthetic possibilities that redefined art's form and function.

      Duchamp instinctively understood that the scientific approach to innovation – one where the individual achieved objectivity through incremental steps framed by pre-existing rules, or repeated laws to prove a thesis – was at odds with the process that enabled the artist to trust in his or her emotions. Duchamp proposed that:

      The artist goes from intention to realisation through a chain of totally subjective reactions offer business an insight into the value of gut reaction as a valuable source of innovation opportunity. In contrast to the tendency of the ‘scientific’ approach to minimize unpredictable outcomes artists are more likely to discover unprecedented potential by trusting in chance.

(Marcel Duchamp, The Creative Act, 1957)

      Duchamp's transformation of everyday products into art works through the combination of signature and gallery display simultaneously disrupted the history of art, exhibiting, criticism, curating and collecting. His radical proposition was arguably the single most disruptive act in the history of art: ‘My idea was to choose an object that wouldn't attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see.'

The Business of being Avant-Garde

      The most important takeaway from Duchamp's contribution to the avant-garde is the need to challenge archetypes. This is equally true for brands, which waste so much time and money supporting tired propositions when they could be investing in game changing innovation.

      The cafés of Montmartre did not just cater for artists; rather, they were part of a mix of individuals on a common endeavour to take ownership of the future. The crowd that came to cafés to converse and disrupt were inspired by the entrepreneurs, scientists and engineers who were challenging the very notion of what was possible. Gustave Eiffel's monumental Viaduc De Garabit, completed in 1884, had already signalled the potential for a new age of engineering transformation long before the Eiffel Tower opened for business in 1899. Pasteur had made the world a safer place through some extraordinary medical breakthroughs in the field of vaccination. Shopping was becoming a new form of leisure, ushering in the growth of the fashion industry as seasons emerged as a pretext for the notion of style redundancy. France had pioneered the department store concept of retailing in 1838 with the opening of Le Bon Marché.

Brand Dreams

      The construction of the Eiffel Tower served as a contemporary icon to define a future-looking city. In the same way, the emergence of modern retail in Paris informed the evolution of the art of innovative branding. There was proactive serendipity between modern art and commerce as the aesthetics that emerged from café culture were quickly co-opted into the labelling and advertising of new brands.

      There is a clear synchronicity between the conditions that gave way to the birth of the avant-garde in the late nineteenth century and the instability that brands are currently facing today. However, 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.

Some of the Lessons that Contemporary Business can Learn from the Avant-Garde

      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

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http://archive.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/1609/ff_starwarscanon?currentPage=all.