Keeping it private
Recently, The Sunday Times Style magazine ran an article profiling a place called the Hospital – and no, it is not being discussed in this column because it is a recovery ward for badly bruised directors of HR. It is because it has taken an organic idea of creative talent management, and formalised and packaged it for a more corporate society.
The Hospital is a private members’ club for arty types, but not just any arty types – the crème de la crème of celebrity creatives, essentially ‘creative entrepreneurs’. Founded by former Eurythmics drummer Dave Stewart and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, there was a great buzz a few years back when the concept for this club was first mooted. Basically, it provides a venue for people of diverse artistic output to exchange ideas and, well, party with those of their own ilk. There hovers in the background the notion that a young creative – be it musician, artist, designer or whatever – might find an older, more established artist to mentor him/her. If a Victorian old boy’s club mated with Soho’s 1950s French House, this would be their love child.
Except, it’s not. It is, instead, a puzzling concept.
The ethos of a place like the French House, was not just that artists met to discuss art, but that they were also ‘dirtied’, so to speak; inspired by their surroundings and interaction with the inclement hoi polloi – of which they were very much a part. Would Toulouse Lautrec be the artist he was without the Moulin Rouge? The chances are slimmer than a size 0 model. Would Samuel Coleridge have been the same without his grotty opium dens? The notion floats away like a puff of smoke. Would Hogarth have been so potent without his brothels and gin palaces? It is a sobering thought. The raison d’etre of being an artist is that you distil the world at large and express it back. It is a magnificent alchemy, not just self-expression, but overall human expression. The notion of isolating talent, oddly corralling it among nothing but itself, runs the dangerous risk of distilling celebrity down to its shallowest form. The Hospital has gone online for members and is referred to as a ‘walled garden of creativity’. A curious phrase, for it is essential that creativity remains without walls. It is freedom.
It is true: arty types tend to congregate together, and this is no bad thing. Exchanging ideas is exciting and stimulating. But they must also be dispersed among the realities of hard life.
Thinking laterally, this is a principle that can be applied to talent management as a whole. Talent should be nurtured surely, but it must also live in the world as it is so that it can use its strengths to enhance it and promote understanding. If it doesn’t really know the practical problems, if it doesn’t live with them, it can’t shift the balance to solutions.
It is a scientific fact that sound does not travel in a vacuum. Neither does creativity
