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These remarks were delivered to UW class Art 508 "Art Colloquium" at
Granger Hall in Madison April 11, 2006.
Course website:
www.art.wisc.edu/Art508/Art508.htm
Good afternoon. The university has asked me to speak to you
today on how I use aesthetics in my business and my life, because,
like so many graduates, especially in the fine arts, I chose
a career other than my major. When asked to title my talk many
things sprang to mind: "Art and
business in bed together," "Ignorance can be your ally," "Start by being
laughed at, and then have the last laugh all the rest of your life,"
"Sculpt a business just like clay" because I really do wonder what
happened to me. I still make art regularly (still feel like an art
student, in fact), yet I own and operate The Soap Opera
(www.thesoapopera.com) a retail store in downtown Madison selling all
kinds of natural body care products which my partner and I founded in 1972.
 It all started with the supernatural. I remember I was 12 years old.
I attended a birthday party where I met a fortune teller. She asked me, "Well what will it be for you, business or profession?" I was an army
brat from a military family, somewhat sheltered, and I had no idea what
she meant, so I reached for what sounded sophisticated and blurted out,
"Profession." She laid out the cards and pronounced, "Nope. Business for
you." End of reading. I filed that away.
Jumping ahead six years, on the first day of undergraduate school at Ohio
Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH, as I aimlessly wandered from
departmental table to departmental table wondering whether I should major
in Drama or Fine Arts (the only two possibilities I considered), I heard,
with great clarity, a voice in my head saying, "Choose Fine Arts."
Hearing voices in my head at this time in my life was not too hard to
believe since I was, as so many are from time to time, in an acute state
of adolescent panic, and, in fact, upon reflection, the word despair seems
to fit. To begin with, I was gay and closeted in rural Ohio, and in 1965,
pre-Stonewall, pre-diversity, pre-alternative lifestyles, etc. this was
not a good place to be and I was, frankly, a lot more than miserable. I
was scared. Fear arose from another place too. Failure in college meant
certain drafting into the military, and though I had grown up in a
military environment, being drafted at the time of Viet Nam, was the last
thing I wanted. Somehow I had gotten the idea that college was so
difficult that flunking out was easy, so I was certain I was in danger of
being sent to war. Carrying this load of double panic ("all's fair in
love and war"), the arts suddenly felt safe, they felt easy, separate
somehow, and they felt like a place to hide out from everyone, including
myself.
So I became an art major, did what I was told, kept my head down, and
instantly fell in love with a whole bunch of things that have made me feel
good ever since: the sheer joy of making things, the rich physicality of
the tools of art making, paints, brushes, exotic chemicals and mysterious
potions, and all the other paraphernalia of studio art. Imagine seeing a
humble pencil create an image! Then I made the miraculous and happy
discovery of art history, art talk, art's seemingly open-ended vistas, its
liberation for the intellect as one seeks precision of expression and
comes to grips with the visual and the verbal all at once.
 Perhaps most importantly I found dedicated, gifted, heroic, and
inspirational teachers, worshiped them, in fact, and since they were all
practicing artists first, instructors second, I developed no other goal
than to be just like them. Soon, with their help, I spent a year in New
York City at the Whitney Museum of American Art, painting and exploring,
and dabbling in the fast track of the art world. By this time I was making
minimal art - paintings which were huge, empty, expansive, impressive, but
largely lacking of feeling, and certainly devoid of any subject
matter. No one was buying. Finally, I landed in Madison for my masters degree.
Madison was like arriving in paradise. The university gave me
everything: scholarships, a studio, art, and art history departments
inspiring in scope, atmosphere, scholarship, and place to come out safely
(the world was changing, at least in Madison), followed shortly by a fated
meeting with Chuck Beckwith (an art history major who became and remains
my life partner), and finally my M.A. It was 1970. Then the boom came
down: Now what?
Oscar Wilde's famous quotation, "When bankers get together they discuss
Art, but when artists get together, they discuss Money" may be true in
some circles, but it certainly had not been true in academia.
I had been in school five or six years (including summers) and money or
"How do you make a living at this stuff?" was never discussed.
There was always an unspoken undercurrent that such a topic would be
gauche for the idealism of youth, ART writ large in golden letters,
dominated my peers and me.
Well, yes, there was teaching, but how do you do that and where do you
start? I was reluctant to ask anyone. It all seemed unseemly somehow for,
after all, I had not graduated from a trade school. One possibility
(which makes the news magazines we all see) was to somehow make huge fast
paintings and then charge $50,000 a crack. How does that happen? To
whom? How do you pull that string?
So disillusionment descended as I stared at my diploma. Had my education
been a fraud? What did I have that anyone might want? What did I have to
offer? What could I do? Was I a fraud, too?
In the recent book "Why Art Cannot be Taught" by James Elkins we read:
"Many art schools (and even university art departments) brag about their
former graduates. For example, where I teach (University of Illinois
Press) we list Georgia O'Keefe, Thomas Hart Benton, Claes Oldenburg,
Richard Estes, and Joan Mitchell, though most of them dropped out. It
might be more honest and thought provoking to go ahead and list famous
graduates in the college brochure, but to preface the list with a disclaimer:
"Disclaimer: Although these artists did study at our school, we deny any
responsibility for their success. We have no idea what they learned while
they were here, what they thought was important, and what wasn't, or
whether they would have been better off in jail. We consider it luck that
these artists were at our school. In general, we disclaim the ability to
teach art at this level. We offer knowledge of the art community, the
facilities to teach a variety of techniques, and faculty who can teach
many ways of talking about art.
But any relation between what we teach and truly interesting art is purely
coincidental. "And the flyer might add, in the interests of full disclosure: "We
will not discuss this disclaimer on school time because our courses are set
up on the assumption that it is false."
Now I'll confess to a scandalous false start, my first experiment with
free enterprise. As I took stock I realized that as a youthful esthete,
that among my esoteric and rarefied skills, I was being able to write good
art history papers. The university was often in turmoil due to the war,
and there arose out of the chaos an underground business which purchased
term papers written to order. These papers were then resold to lazy
students not willing to write their own. I became the art history paper
writer at $1.00 a page. My work was sold by others for $2.00 a page to
cheating students I never met. Of course eventually the ring was
busted. I had to make confessional visits to beloved instructors, and
regret this lapse in ethics even now, but isn't everyone allowed one
youthful mis-step?
 Anyway, I had blundered into my first experience with business, but
clearly I needed another plan. However, the timeless game of "buy it for
one dollar and sell it for two" did get my attention. On a whim, then, we
started making crafts and selling them on the Library Mall artists make
stuff, after all, and regulated sales carts we see today were not required
then. We simply spread out a blanket. Selling crafts was fun and an
adventure, but winter came and so, again like so many others who'd hit a
wall what did I do? Well, of course, I went to California, the place D.H.
Lawrence described so aptly: "California is filled with sunbaked people
and half baked ideas."
Soon Chuck Beckwith followed me. He had discovered a small startup
company in Berkeley, CA making natural soaps, body care, and perfumes that
were very alternative, but professionally formulated and manufactured yet
designed for people like us to repackage and re-label for retail sale
allowing our sweat equity and graphic arts ability to work for us.
In those days products for personal care were available only in drug
stores and mass markets such as supermarkets, etc., but what we had
discovered was in the European tradition, a specialty item, a kind of
personal parfumerie needing only a tiny space for tiny items, and no
competition in sight. I had grown up in Europe, so I knew what I was
looking at and we saw that this kind of thing had never been available in
the US, yet here it was ready for us to exploit.
Above all, though, we were seeking independence, not wanting to do
anything ordinary after all, we were outcasts of a sort anyway,
unconventional in the extreme, and what we saw resonated with us, so on a
whim we took $600 and ordered soaps, lotions, and perfumes from California
even though we had no place to store or to sell them, aside from a blanket
on the street in warm weather.
Then by accident we discovered and rented a hole in the wall just on the
edge of campus at 515 North Lake Street one half block from State Street
in and old Victorian rooming house, now torn down. At city hall we got a
building permit by accident, too. We had thumbnail plans, everyone was
out to lunch when we arrived, but then we heard shouted from the back "Oh
give the hippies the stamp. That building's going to be torn down anyway."
 We built a tiny store ourselves artists build things, after all. It was
about 10' by 15' Our rent was $30 a month. At a dollar a day (Civil War
wages) we felt safe. Now we were in business, and we stayed in that spot
for 18 months, using a cart on the library mall all summer. It wasn't
like the carts today - it was a child's wagon at first, and then later an
old wooden dresser turned upside down with roller skates attached to the
bottom. Drawers became shelves.
Artists make crazy things in this case we had made something so noisy
that rolling it along the sidewalk alarmed pedestrians and noise pollution
became advertising.
By the next winter, and also by accident, we discovered and rented the
storefront at 312 State Street which was much larger and had a
basement. Again we built everything counter, shelves, etc. using
limited skills, but abundant drive. Now we were not just "playing store" but
were really in business. It was 1974, and we were 27 years old. (Eight years
later we moved to our present location across the street at 319 State Street.)
This start-up five year tale of school to business seems logical now, but
it felt nothing like that. It felt very accidental, weirdly playful,
entirely experimental, fun, crazy, and demanding all at once: perhaps not
unlike some kind of work-study program for artists who needed a dose of
the real world. Then, too, the molding and shaping of a business -- or
the embryo of a business -- was just like making a piece of
art. One proceeds from the general to the specific with some kind of
vision or inspiration gluing things together. And just like making good
art we tried to do the most with the least. The essence of drawing, for
example, is doing the most with the least:
utilizing lost edges, what's left out, negative spaces, implication by
restraint, getting five things right so a hundred will fall into place,
and finally, how much can you get away with.
We were perfectly prepared to do the most with the least. We had no
preconception of what business was, or any preparation for business, or
anything remotely related to business at all. We had zero training,
practically zero capital, zero connections, but we thought like this (just
as you do when you face a blank canvas): Well, how hard can it
be? We'll just do all the work ourselves make a plan pick up a
hammer. We felt like outsiders anyway and our ignorance was an advantage.
In drawing or painting lucky accidents often carry you to success. In all
art happy accidents are a common occurrence. John Ruskin says these gifts
occur in exact proportion to how much training and skill you have
mastered. In other words, they happen when you are ready for them to
happen, when you are open to opportunity, when your awareness is acute
enough to perceive them. The crafts we made, the soap discoveries in
California, the rented holes in the wall were all accidents, and
simultaneously attractive ways of preserving independence, avoiding "real
jobs," cutting hair, submitting to dress codes, accepting preconceived
expectations, and all the rest. Since we were wide open things got through.
 Any art student or visual artist absorbs endless hours of visual training,
both in the studio and studying art history. This training demands at
least a rudimentary mastery of art talk, explaining in words something
that is in another language, a visual language, making a kind of reverse
translation. At its best this exercise becomes a highly rarified skill
otherwise known as "the gift of gab" which, interestingly enough, and is
perfect training for selling anything to anyone. It is part conviction
and part hypnosis something exchanged between speaker and listener.
In a recent New Yorker Magazine biography of an international auctioneer
at Sotheby's Auction House, where millions of dollars hang in the balance
each moment during numerous auctions year round, this auctioneer summed up
his life's work with perfect understanding saying, "My job is to make art
expensive." It's all about the buzz the words and this is perfect
preparation for business, too for selling delicate, personal, precious
body-care items is no different.
Trust, sensitivity, an instinctual feel for rhythm and touch all lubricate
the exchange.
As experienced art folk we felt at home, skilled, and comfortable
designing logos, labels, store displays, product packaging, window
displays, print materials, ads, bringing a whole environment with a
specific and unified atmosphere into focus. One person wrote of this
process: "Like every artist, he has created a territory that is
distinctively his, and under anyone else's supervision it would not cohere."
An artist learns to have a thick skin, and that too is indispensable in
business, especially early on. As an art student half the time maybe
most of the time you don't know what you're doing. One begins to get
comfortable with discomfort, or one gets out. Then one hears all the well
meaning remarks, "Art Major?" "What are you going to do with
that?" "What is that good for?" "Is there any money in that?" I heard it
from afar, like all of us, but I never once heard anything remotely close to
these hard words from my parents. That was a great gift.
Others were not so nice. In our first tiny store some visiting bankers
(remember Wilde's comment on bankers and Art?) dropped in one
day. Shortly they went away laughing at us, and at our tiny store.
Little did they know we could have discussed art with them, or that we
were going to have the last laugh!
As we have seen, art at a certain level cannot be taught anyway, but
observation teaches many things and art school is filled with behavior
that becomes pivotal to running a business. Number one is enthusiasm, the
engine that drives everything in life. Nothing happens without it. An
art major is steeped in it, at least I was, because artists are largely
self motivated, and a creative atmosphere is an enthusiastic one. In
business enthusiasm, being a cheerleader, influencing people to do what
you want, can build a soap store or an empire.
Next, the dedication that one sees in faculty and fellow art students has
an enduring effect. Making stuff is hard, art takes time, and no matter
how much determination one brings to bear a favorable outcome is never
guaranteed. Winston Churchill said it best, "Nothing will make one
observe more quickly or more thoroughly than having to face the difficulty
of representing the thing observed." The most basic drawing class
presents enough problems to last a lifetime. Business is no different
because the simplest challenges are often much more complex than they appear.
Art majors and their world as I experienced it overflowed with sincerity
and integrity, and a belief in something higher and better than
ourselves. We brought that same passion to our business.
Art making demands an immersion in materials, but ironically for the sake
of a non-material end. What a puzzle. And it's the same in business
because if you just want the money forget it, but if you want the
satisfaction of doing something well then the money will take care of
itself. The pursuit of creativity for its own sake is no different from
the fascination one feels for creating systems and techniques of
organization that all business enterprise demands. In a way these
material paradoxes reflect the spiritual paradoxes that we all sense from
time to time: that only by living for others can we find ourselves, and
that we are spiritual beings occasionally having fleeting material
experiences, not the reverse, the conventional view.
 Perhaps the most obvious benefit of being an art major is acquiring an
above average degree of visual acuity, which, at its best, leads to acute
visual insight, razor sharp visual memory, a 20/20 mind's eye, and an
ability to think in pictures far more fluidly than many people. Since
artists spend so much time in their right brain one soon realizes that one
often sees what others miss, or just simply sees in a very different way,
and this too allows, strangely perhaps, one to see trends and threads in
the world of commerce just as clearly as one might see rhythms and tones
on a canvas.
So don't worry, art majors can't be taught anything anyway, and the less
you know what you're doing the better off you are. You learn about art by
doing it. Just make as much art and study as much art as you can,
practice deliberate, mindful, and constant observation, nurture passionate
interests, endless patience, stay trusting, and welcoming to luck, chance,
happenstance, chaos. Then get ready for fortune tellers, voices in your
head, happy accidents, chance meetings, anything that comes along.
Currently the world seems to be offering us a great deal of opportunity
and hope, yet we find fear in equal measure, and one senses increasing
polarization everywhere. So I think it becomes more important than ever
for artists "to allow the grey," and to let the black and white care of itself.
Art is exactly like life: The more you put into it, the more you get out
of it. We can all recognize a lazy line in a contour drawing.
Paying attention is all that's required. Art shows us how everything can
be recorded for all to see. It offers instant feedback and an
indispensable tool for living and celebrating existence.
Do you have to "suffer to be beautiful"? Not really, but think about it
anyway. The paradox of giving up the self to find the self is always in
play. And remember that youth opens doors, so take advantage of it. When
I was 21, and painting in NYC, Andy Warhol's Factory was just a few blocks
away. I could have walked right in, and I thought about it, but was much too
shy. Those few steps might have changed everything. Perhaps it's for the best
I didn't take them, but you never know. So remember, there is nothing you can
have when you are old that can replace being young and having nothing.
Finally, I want to leave you with my favorite Japanese Gateway for A Happy
Life. In this gateway art is the keystone at the top:
| MAKE ART. |
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| GET ENOUGH REST. | | KEEP YOUR NOSE CLEAN. |
| |
| EAT RIGHT. |
| DON'T FEEL GUILTY. |
Comments on my work (www.ctbauer.com)
when shown to the group included the
following:
- Making art is purely for my own pleasure.
- Remain a student.
- Enjoy the challenge, and stay self-motivated.
- Capture beauty plein air painting gives you a tool to express your
reactions.
- Appreciate our visual world.
- Everything has potential. "See 1000 paintings a day,” said Cezanne.
- Art is not something we do, it's somewhere we go.
- Art allows us to touch infinity; that is why time stops when we make art.
- You are never alone when painting. All the artists who ever lived are
standing by your side, helping you.
- “Education is a wonderful thing, but it is well to remember that nothing
worth knowing can be taught.” Oscar Wild
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