Innovation Motivation

Forum: Incentives for Entrepreneurial Innovation
Feb. 14, 2008
Hudson Institute

Gustavo Manso, professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, presented research revealing that innovators are more prone to failure through experimentation, that failure is a logical and necessary step in the road to success, and that government and industry should support the creation of incentives for experimentation.

Too often, entrepreneurial risk is regarded with fear, and failure branded with stigma.

A few noteworthy points:

* Debtor-friendly bankruptcy laws can foster innovation by enabling entrepreneurs who just barely missed the mark to try again. Ironically, Europe has been revising bankruptcy laws to model those more forgiving conventions in the the U.S., while the U.S. is now ratcheting up regs.

* Pay for performance was shown in Manso’s research to actually depress creativity.

* A better incentive to motivate exploration and experimentation: an “Exploration Contract.” By incenting exploration, Manso noted the business ventures got closer to the optimal business strategy than those subjects under pay-for-performance and fixed-wage contracts.

* Back to the lemonstand stand.... A key model used in the study was that time-honored indie business symbol: the lemonade stand. Research subjects who were employed under an exploration contract made remarkably greater strides in scouting locations that would best support a new business.

* Innovation team-building blocks: discussant Robert Baum, associate professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland, noted employee selection is critical and that tools exist for evaluating potential employees. For example, look for prospects who express “situation-specific obsession.” If you’re looking to create the world’s best car seat, look for people already jazzed about that goal. Next comes motivation and retention.

* The subprime mortgage mess is having a negative impact on entrepreneurial activity, since credit-tightening means less money for new pursuits and unproven technologies. Breaking convention costs money.

Inability to borrow money will change attitude and effort. If you can afford only one shot, will you try something really new, or take the safer route?

Forum transcript, Manso’s “Motivating Innovation” study report, and more on http://www.hudson.org

Degas to Diebenkorn: The Phillips Collects

Degas to Diebenkorn: The Phillips Collects

Fitting it is that painter Susan Rothenberg’s Three Masks (2006) graces not only the current Phillips Collection Magazine’s cover but also its table of contents. This most recent acquisition’s debut depicts two of the masks hung by their cords and a disembodied pair of hands reaching for (adjusting, re-hanging?) the third. An obvious allegory is the Phillips’ philosophy of ongoing aggressive contemporary acquisitions – or in the words of museum director Jay Gates, “We’re always moving things around.”

Gates, now preparing to retire, spent the last decade fund-raising record amounts and promised gifts to continue founder Duncan Phillips’ mission of assembling paintings, sculptures, photographs, and works on paper from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Now, the latest one hundred or so acquisitions, with 28 new-to-the-Phillips artists, make up this show. Note the present tense of the verb and final word of the show’s title, “Collects.”

This museum, America’s original for modern art, intimates an eloquence impossible in big-box spots. Unlike the yawning security guards at museum exhibits, Phillips attendants seem well-versed in each piece. Enriching wall text relieves that “I just don’t get this”feeling the casual observer has toward non-representational and abstract art. This show has enough colorful swaths in the eponymous Diebenkorns, Frankenthalers, Motherwells, and Scullys to need that assist.

Even the cellphone audio tour personalizes the experience over the wonder-who-wore-this-last headset. A video loop of outdoor sculpture shows how to shoehorn two tons of Ellsworth Kelly and Barbara Hepworth into tight urban spaces. (Bring your own crane.)

On view to May 25, “Degas to Diebenkorn” does not disappoint. Perfectly complimenting and expanding the permanent collection, this touchstone show caps Jay Gates’ tenure of phenomenal growth.

Details:

The Phillips Collection
1600 21st Street, NW, near the Dupont Circle Metro (Q Street exit).
Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday Artful Evenings until 8:30 p.m.; Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Website: http://www.phillipscollection.org

Degas to Diebenkorn features nearly 100 works by Emodern masters including Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas,
Hans Hofmann, Paul Klee, Ansel Adams, Milton Avery, Alexander Calder, Richard Diebenkorn, Elizabeth Murray, Robert Motherwell, Aaron Siskand, and David Smith, as well as living artists William Christenberry, Howard Hodgkin, Ellsworth Kelly, Sean Scully, and many others.

- Posted by Kevin Tierney

Sample of what's on view: Moonlight on the Osage, 1938, by Thomas Hart Benton Tempera on masonite, Partial and Promised Gift of Linda Lichtenberg Kaplan, 2001

Paula Rego: Surreal Life

Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives 1840–1860

On view through May 4 at the National Gallery of Art in D.C.

William Henry Fox Talbot was not blind to the aesthetic and commercial potential of the new technology he helped pioneer. The Englishman was quick to patent processes that produced early photographs. In 1840, for example, he discovered that even brief exposure to light left a latent image on sensitized paper, and this latent image could be conjured for all to behold by bathing the paper in chemicals.

Thus, the calotype was born. The name derives from the Greek word for “Beautiful.” Ten years later saw the invention of a process utilizing collodion on glass to produce negatives faster and with markedly greater clarity.

However, Brits continued on with the calotype. Some preferred the technique for its qualities such as softening detail and nuance of light and shadow. For others, it held more pragmatic benefits: it was easier to deal with paper negatives instead of glass when traveling or working in hot climates.

A new touring exhibition, Impressed By Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives 1840 - 1860, alighted recently in D.C. at the National Gallery of Art. Curator Roger Taylor attributes the survival of these mesmerizing 120 calotypes to “benign neglect” – the original owners typically filed them away in albums, protected through the decades.

The medium gave rise to a small but devoted legion of citizen-photojournalists and accidental artists. Their subjects, displayed with restraint and elegance in this exhibition, range from nature’s elfin elements to man’s monumental achievements. We see the delicate angularity of tiny twigs and the massive stacking of stone in the Colosseum. Steam locomotives, a domed Russian skyscape, and the Taj Mahal share space with mist-shrouded mountains and tree trunks shattered by lightening.

Naturally, Talbot shows up on the walls; look for his 1841 “Wild Fennel” that could easily pass as a sample of science-art microphotography or postmodern minimalist. It’s a striking work.

But this is an opportunity for discovering underexposed, even unexposed, talents. Such as Alfred Capel Cure, whose albumen silver prints form much of the bulwark of this collection. His portrait of a “Blasted Tree at Badger” (1856) surely triggered memories if not PTSD for the photographer: a year before, Cure nearly died while leading his men into battle during the siege of Sebastopol in the Crimean War. Once there, artillery fire ripped apart his troops.

More serene is a candid of his ebony dog snoozing in a thicket. In this salted paper print, Cure used a very long exposure to capture a marvelous range of textures from fur to leaves. The composition reveals his keen eye for composition. Good thing the dog didn’t stir.

“Pots and Pans at Nice” is more entrancing than its title would suggest. Alfred Backhouse proved that one need not scale peaks and cross oceans for interesting views; heck, a kitchen raid will do.

Photography gave affluent polymaths the means to document their journeys while expressing their artistic sensibilities. Jane Martha St. John compiled a travelogue unique among her contemporaries, carting her camera equipment throughout Italy. A century and a half later, she gives us a glimpse of the Colosseum, a silent paean to the ruins that, at least that day, were untrammeled by tourists.

Some shots document humans’ less admirable imprints on history. John Murray memorialized the site of the Indian Mutiny’s most horrific event. Exhibition notes for “Suttee Ghat, Cawnpore” tell the story: Hoping for mercy, an English detachment at Cawnpore surrendered to rebels on the promise that they and the European families who had taken refuge in their barracks would be granted safe passage. Instead, soldiers and civilians alike were fired upon as they boarded boats at the barren site depicted in this photograph. Two hundred women and children who survived were marched back to Cawnpore, killed, dismembered and thrown down a well.

Such downbeat selections serve to round out and add gravity to this window on the past, and on the dawn of a novel art form. In some cases, these early photography buffs were carting around more than 500 pounds of equipment – stark contrast to our pocket-sized digi bits. A nice place to catch your breath is in front of Horatio Ross’s castle perched on a faraway cliff.

Voice Care: Sing in the Key of Ahhhh....

Voice Care article - one of my new ones. For anyone who sings, acts, lectures or speaks.

http://dcpaper.examiner.com/content/e-edition/2007/12/06/2/33.pdf

The Story of Stuff

The Story of Stuff:

Features enviro expert Annie Leonard. Great video piece on resource cycle, toxins, ecological imbalance, cycle of waste, waste stream, damage to societies, planned obsolescence, golden arrow of consumption, closed loop production. Concise, engaging scripting and amusing visuals. Short, smart and worth watching.

http://www.storyofstuff.com:80/index.html

Photography as art. Or not.

Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rob Besserer, Cumberland Island, Georgia, 1990. chromogenic print. Photograph © Annie Leibovitz.



Annie Leibovitz Gets Personal at the Corcoran; Amateur Hour at the National Gallery

If anything can steal the thunder of Ansel Adams’s iconic American landscapes, it might be Annie Leibovitz’s portraits. Leave it to the Corcoran to stage a photo frenzy, opening Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005 within days of debuting an Adams retrospective.

The Leibovitz feature is two shows in one, combining her personal snapshots and professional portraits. Or three, if you count the super-size nature shots that compete for your gaze in the finale-gallery.

Black and white, color; formal commissions and family snapshots; pleasure, power and pain ... the disparate works harmonize in the context of this exhibition. One reason: the unfussy wall choreography directed by Corcoran curator Paul Roth, which earned praise from the artist herself. (The traveling exhibition opened at the Brooklyn Museum last year.)

Also harmonizing the portraits are Leibovitz’s supreme ability to capture simultaneously the person and personality, stripping away the veneer of celebrity and dispersing the smog of self-consciousness, freeing the subjects to express their individuality. “This is how I want you to know me.” And perhaps “This is how I want to be remembered.” That is what went through my mind as I became acquainted through via photos with the artist’s father and her companion Susan Sontag, both of whom recently joined the departed.

Throughout the exhibition, eyes anticipate and seek out the viewer. Called them staged, but the portraits engage so fully that sometimes it’s a struggle to withdraw your attention do you can move on to the next print.

Arts writers had the pleasure of a tour guided by Leibovitz herself. She is a professional who found her calling early in life and wasted no time in embracing it. Her work for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Vogue and other forums reflects a sensitive eye, keen mind and rock-solid work ethnic; patience, foresight and assertiveness culminate in unforgettable shots. From Queen to cleaning lady to Sarajevo casualty’s grounded bicycle and blood stains, each shot compels you to stop, look and virtually make acquaintance with the subject.

The show also offers a rare glimpse of the photographer’s family – we see her young children romping and her mother – to whom Leibovitz credits the intimacy of her work – frollicking at the beach. Leibovitz, who grew up in Silver Spring, reveals some of herself as she illuminates her subjects..

Leibovitz recalled early dance training, memories and moves that manifest themselves in the motion pent up in so many of her pictures.

Three March 2007 portraits of the Queen, seamlessly shoehorned into the Corcoran stop on the show’s circuit, include one that will probably displace any previous images you had of Queen Elizabeth II.

Same goes for an ecstasy-inducing glimpse of Mikhail Baryshnikov held aloft by Rob Besserer.

Meanwhile, the National Gallery of Art entertains with The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978. If you’re trying to convince someone that photography is art, don’t use this show as an example. That’s not to say that the dozens of anonymous snaps collected by Robert E. Jackson don’t rate a viewing. Fun shots from the early decades of the 20th century include crazy stunts such as a man hanging upside-down from a telephone pole, wacky experiments with perspective, and all manner of mugging for the camera. Un-self-conscious subjects snooze, slouch, pout, skinny dip, disrobe, vogue, clown around, and express themselves in ways inspired by the presence of a camera lens.

With its wealth of exhibitions and powerhouse status, the National Gallery can let its hair down once in awhile. It’s amusing to ponder how these unknown snapsters would react to the news that their casual clicks ended up not in the trash but in a national repository for fine art just steps from world masters and under the watchful eye of security guards.

These artifacts offer a stark contrast to the art of Annie Leibovitz. But both collections affirm the power of photography in immortalizing men, women and moments. With this assist from the National Gallery, the folks populating collector Jackson’s found treasures will be goofing off for eternity. For my piece on the American Snapshot in the Examiner, go to http://dcpaper.examiner.com/content/e-edition/2007/10/29/2/27.pdf .

Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005
Through Jan 13
Corcoran Gallery of Art
500 17th St., NW
202-639-1700
corcoran.org
Admission fee varies

The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978
Through December 31
National Gallery of Art, West Building
202-737-4215
nga.gov
Free

Ansel Adams exhibiton review – use this link: http://dcpaper.examiner.com/content/e-edition/2007/09/17/2/27.pdf