What I found interesting is that the Business people were open to the idea and willing to create opportunities for the artists but the artists were very uncompromising.

Sadly, I can easily believe this is true. I find it amazing how many so-called ‘creative people’ have very conventional ideas about what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

Great post on your blog – “Business is Life and Life is Business”. Nicely put.

@ Violet – Glad you liked it, did you see these pieces about creativity and routine? Daily Routines of Famous Creative People and Creative Ritual or Mundane Routine?

Your profiles add legitimacy to your ideas. This is one of the best blogs on the net.

The never compromise area is a place where I have struggled a long time. Just recently I was told to lower my standards of quality as it was narrowing the margins on our business.

It’s caused me to once again want to push further away from other peoples visions and push my own.

I also recently was asked to be a part of an organization of artists that would try to bridge the gap between business and arts. What I found interesting is that the Business people were open to the idea and willing to create opportunities for the artists but the artists were very uncompromising.

They felt that the business people should enter the art spaces and that bringing art into the business spaces was somehow “wrong.” As mentioned by Adam “selling out”

I sort of did a similar post about myself as I try to make this art/business/life thing work.

http://arthub.ca/343/ignore-everybody/

Still working on my writing but I thought it relevant.

@ David – Excellent points. Yes Pound was a superb poet in his own right and a great collaborator for Eliot. If we compare The Waste Land to Bowie’s Low/Heroes albums (bear with me on this) then Pound was the Eno to Eliot’s Bowie – he didn’t have his name on the cover, but his contribution was vital to the finished result.

Re being trendy – you’ve reminded me I was going to have a section called ‘Be in the Right Place at the Right Time’. I might edit that in…

@ Adam – Yes, in some ways Eliot was ahead of his time. Or you could compare him to Shakespeare, a poet-entrepreneur. Is it a coincidence that two of the greatest poets in English were also successful businessmen? I think we should be told.

As far as I’m concerned, we’ll never hear enough stories about people who didn’t think art and business were mutually exclusive. In the 60+ years since Eliot was writing, we have not come very far when it comes to thinking that artists who pursue business are “selling out.”

Thanks for the post, Mark.

- Ezra Pound’s influence cannot be stated enough. Pound not only published and championed Eliot’s work, he also HEAVILY edited The Waste Land — the poem which would make Eliot a household name.

- Eliot was successful because he was TRENDY. Of course, he was a brilliant poet. But so was Elisabeth Bishop, who will forever remain a “poet’s poet”.

The Modernist style — with its obscure allusions, with its difficulty, with its emphasis on the importance of the text itself, rather than the importance of anything else — like all trends in literature has passed.

The best business lesson we can learn from Eliot is to jump on the bandwagon at the best possible time, and then have the skill to LEAD that bandwagon.

Eliot didn’t invent Modernism, he didn’t have to, but he was more than comfortable assuming the role of leading it.