WSJ -- Corporate Art Choice: Go for Bold Statement Or Creepy Blandness ? .........................
August 8, 2006
Corporate Art Choice: Go for Bold Statement Or Creepy Blandness?
By JARED SANDBERG
You might think getting on the corporate art committee would be a plum assignment -- if you didn't know Todd Lief's story.
When his former boutique advertising agency moved into a high-rent district, Mr. Lief and a partner began the search for a new piece of art for the office lobby. They wanted to make a creative statement with something well-crafted, engaging and as memorable as the best ads. They settled on a sculpture of painted wood that resembled a tree and had a subtle human form.
"Then the fun began," says Mr. Lief. Half his colleagues loved it, but "half threatened to quit if it wasn't removed at once," he says. Some managers liked it, while others said the company should be attending to business. Clients, too, were divided: Some were charmed, others were belligerent, even threatening to take their business elsewhere.
So Mr. Lief pulled the sculpture into his office and it was replaced with something he can't remember. "It probably had that quality of benign invisibility," he says, "and would upset nobody." After a few years, he resigned and later bought the sculpture, which was in storage, for his living room where it still stands.
Despite Oscar Wilde's contention that through art alone "we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence," corporate art can have as much a can't-win quality as the office thermostat setting. Spend too little on it and employees think the company doesn't care. Spend too much and you risk resentment that the company can splurge for a Calder but nickel and dime employee co-pays. Bold art can offend; inoffensive art can confer a creepy neutrality. Amid the reactions, which put our varsity griping skills in the starkest relief, there's always some furrowed-brow employee claiming his kindergartner painted something better.
At the high end, bank collections, including Deutsche Bank's 50,000 pieces and J.P. Morgan Chase's contemporary art, are legendary. Law firms, technology and drug companies also have amassed collections often tended by in-house curators, sometimes loaned to museums and even discussed in lectures for staffs.
Most corporate art consultants say collections are first for the benefit of employees and second for the company image. But when Kmart, acquired by Sears, put up for sale in June its headquarters' collection, including a Picasso tapestry and a 15th-century Chinese Ming Dynasty watercolor, it was hard to see the employee benefit considering the art outlasted 22,000 fired workers.
Management consultant Bill Casey thinks precious collections signal excesses. "A nice cafeteria is good," he says, "but do you bring in a four-star chef from Paris?"
The discount end of the corporate art spectrum is the dare-to-dream motivational posters purchased by some companies that think they'll actually work. Whenever Jerry Galiger, who sells battery handling systems, sees that a customer has a dog-eared motivational poster "that no one presently pays any attention to, or what they represent," he says. "I can basically tell I'd be wasting my time."
Most workers think art improves the workplace, consultants say. But that feeling can change when confronted with a particular piece -- say a painting of a big, pink foot on a green background. "It didn't say anything to me," says one former bank employee, still befuddled by the foot.
Staff reactions, as diverse as fingerprints, are the reason corporate art consultants sound resigned to not pleasing all of the people some of the time. "One thing we like to say is if people are complaining, then at least they're paying attention," says Heather Gibson of art advisers art4Business Inc.
Some practiced consultants go through great pains to prime their employee audiences. That includes letting staffers experience some time with bare walls to appreciate the art when it arrives, says Susan Abbott, author of "Corporate Art Consulting." Signs or plaques explaining the art are helpful, too -- particularly when one client was expecting a landscape but was mistakenly sent a nude portrait, with an eye-level gander at a pelvis. A sign posted next to it explained the mix-up and that no harm was intended.
Because research has shown people are most productive when they design their own work space, Ms. Abbott likes to present people with choices. "You don't want to just jam something down someone's throat," she says.
That may explain why engineering consultant John Walker has never liked his former company's collections, including dead-boss portraiture and hierarchical collections where executives get oil paintings and department heads get scenic calendars. Once, the company founder told everyone he'd change the art if they didn't like it. "But he'd change one Venice scene painted in 1741 for another," Mr. Walker says.
He thinks employees should be told to hang what they like, he says, "but that's never been said to me."
• Email me at Jared.Sandberg@wsj.com
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