Michael Hugos, Board Chairman

The Business of Art

Beneath the Chinese characters on a sign outside the business school at the Nanjing Normal University (NNU) there were these words in English:

A head for business,

A heart for the world.

The International Dance Learning project is here to focus on that second line yet its connection to the first line is unmistakable.

We were officially welcomed this morning to the Music School at NNU by its dean, Professor Yu Zizheng. In his remarks, he said he was interested in strengthening the exchange program between his university and Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) where CDI’s artistic director is a professor in the Music Department and head of the dance program there. One of the ways he wanted to do this is to include his colleagues in the NNU business school and arrange for exchanges of students and professors with NEIU business school.

As a business person myself who is devoted to the arts, this idea got my attention. Art and business might seem like opposites (and perhaps they are) but I think they need each other and each grows stronger when combined with the other.

The words on the sign outside the business school here bring to mind a famous essay by Thomas Jefferson titled “A Dialog Between My Head and My Heart”. Thomas Jefferson put it so well, let me quote a couple of passages from that essay:

HEAD – You must learn to look forward before you take a step which may interest our peace. Everything in this world is a matter of calculations… The art of life is the art of avoiding pain and he is the best pilot who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which he is beset.

HEART – When nature assigned us the same habitation, she gave us over it a divided empire. To you she allotted the field of science; to me that of morals… Morals were too essential to the happiness of man to be risked on the uncertain combinations of the head.

Even in art there are the long negotiations to determine what will happen and when they will happen and by whom. Those negotiations have been going on for several months and today they came to their conclusion. This is the business of it all.

But for any negotiation to have meaning and depth it has to connect with the heart. A contract is only words; for those words to come alive they must have a heart. This is art; art gives life to business.

Businessmen negotiate and artists collaborate. Negotiation without collaboration has no chance of becoming reality. And collaboration without negotiation has no guidance to reach its destination.