• CHAIRPERSONS
• GUEST SPEAKERS
• PERFORMERS AND ARTISTS
• BACKGROUND - THE GOAL
• BACKGROUND - A NOTE ON THE CONCEPT OF AUTHENTICITY
• BACKGROUND - THE THREE TRACKS
• BACKGROUND - THE FOUR SPECTRA
• PRELIMINARY PROGRAMME
• PRACTICALITIES
• LIST OF PARTICIPANTS
• DOWNLOAD ACCEPTED PAPERS

Professor Ole FOGH KIRKEBY
Copenhagen Business School
Director of the Centre for Art & Leadership
Copenhagen
Denmark

Conductor Peter HANKE
Copenhagen Business School
Artistic director, Centre for Art & Leadership
Copenhagen
Denmark

Centre for Art & Leadership
www.cbs.dk/cal

Mads ØVLISEN
Chairman of
the Board Novo Nordisk A/S, Lego A/S and the Danish Royal Theatre

Professor Lars QVORTRUP
University of Southern Denmark

Gunilla Von BAHR
Principal/Headmaster of
Kungliga Musikhögskolan i Stockholm

  - http://www.novonordisk.com/about_us/management/mads_ovlisen.asp

Contemporary Opera Denmark - Orfeo
&
Martin Tulinius, Director
(www.orfeo.dk)

Medici String Quartet
&
Professor Paul Robertson

The concept of “artists-in-residence” can be approached both theoretically and empirically, both through a spectre of rather concrete visions born by a utopian desire, and through a modest construction of “a state of the art”. After all, its preliminary forms are outdated, and its new kaleidoscope of manifold realities has hardly been shaken. “Artists-in-residence” could be viewed as the modern version of the Trojan horse, promoting restorative powers, or smuggling revolutionary perspectives inside the walls of the organisation.

“Artists-in-residence” could be viewed as an experiment of a new communion, the one that Plato speaks about in the Gorgias, the communion that makes friendship among members of the organisation possible by drawing the lines of a new order, of a new justice, a “taxis” of the meticulous, or a “microcosmos” that arises between heaven and earth, and gods and men (508A), but manifests itself most properly in the mind of the individual. Here the battle for authenticity is staged, because art might easily be used to promote new spectacular, and clever strategies of power. Art speaks indeed to the mind in a language allied with pathos, hence, opening to new managerial micro-technologies, which seek to unite the private and the working life in a brave new organisational paradise; but art are also able to entice through levels of enthusiasm, during the realisation of which individual freedom and criticism in the employee are deposited behind a door without a key. Pathos must be transformed through a strict concept of logos and ethos, if it shall be able to release the capacities of dispositional attitudes, of moods, and of cognitively shaped emotions to procure justice inside the organisation. 

Art is the result of a very fine balance among factors, which by themselves might seem even futile: Deprived of music the opera could be seen as noting but a pathetic, almost stupid piece of rhetoric. Deprived of movement, the film is nothing but static constructions of a reality in which the tragic gesture of fastening the moment has become empty. Deprived of colour the pictures are only sketches, which present the sad lack of presence. Deprived of the possibility of voice, literature is nothing but an imposing invasion of thoughts into your head without certificates of truth. Without the majestic acceptance of history to let its bond of tradition be broken, new architecture is only the vain attempt at atoning unscrupulous consummation and the purposelessness of purpose. Without the synchronism of voices, music is the production of isolation, autism or even frenzy. Thus, the task of introducing, and of integrating art in the organisational setting, outside its proper domains, is a real challenge.

So, let us join together in a feast or a symposium of the aim of which is to produce a fine new vintage, in distilling from the arts the quintessences that make them authentic. We want to explore the authenticity of art in relation to the organisation, and the authenticity of the organisation in relation to art – but we deny that authenticity and contingency should exclude each other. Quite the opposite is the case: Authenticity lives on the contingency of both the “eventum minor” and the “eventum tantum”. Just like creativity, authenticity presupposes a firm framework, a strict logic, and a clear structure, or even discipline, of thought and action.

We must investigate how far the illusionary means and the spectacular pretensions of art have removed it from the hard cores of the social reality of organisation. We must test what art, i.e. artists, are able to do, if our criterion of causing is the (re-) creation of a new justice in the firm. Is art malt whisky for management, opium for the employee, or a real chisel to put between the (invisible) walls, the hammer and the hand?

We must ask whether “artists-in-residence” is the repetition of a new feudal structure anticipated through the new (pseudo-) benevolence of the big corporations, or a phantasm of intimacy in the service of a still more and more anonymous power? Is art the artificial nightingale introduced to disturb the articulation of real social intercourse; or is it the refrain transforming every unimportant chatter into a (quasi-) spectacular exemplar of the legitimating dialogue; or is it, finally, a transformation of the stakeholders into a gaping, obedient and always attentive audience? The folding of art into the cloths of the organisation, must it be as front or back, as background or foreground, and should it be possible to act out a tempest, a simulacrum transformed by the intensity of its own falseness, into a genuine paradigm?

Authenticity both expresses a very special mood that a man might hold in relation to himself and to his work, and an attitude that people might have in relation to each other in organisations internally, and externally, what concerns the stakeholders. Authenticity plays on the opposition between the original and the unoriginal, and, hence, plays on the tension between content and form. Authenticity can be seen as a capacity (from the Greek “dechomai”, “to receive as gift or guest”, “to succeed (of an event)”, but also “to watch for, to be on guard”) that transgresses the worlds of competencies, because its essence is a virtual one: Authenticity confirms a promise for the future by living it out just now. It is thinking itself backwards, without any possibility of compromise. As an attitude authenticity is reflective, in a life-and-death struggle with itself, because the very presence, and the very uniqueness, that it summons, have to express itself through forms and shapes, which in virtue of repetition make deception possible. Authenticity deals with the paradox of existence, hence: 
“What one is, one cannot express, because it is exactly what one is. One can only communicate that which one is not, but in the voice of the community an opening towards the truth might be found…” to paraphrase Kafka.  

Through this predicament authenticity is placed inside the tension between the strategic and the un-strategic that is introduced through the very invocation of a utopian mode of existence.

If art shall be able to meet business life, it can only happen through the maintaining of this tension without the retreat to rhetoric, or to pathetic suggestions. Invocations and icons must not be substitutes for the obligation to the creation of a genuine community. Authenticity must function through an objectivity that is enriched by the belief in the impossible.  

The concept of artists-in-residence is a concept that has to be critically articulated through a sense of its former history from feudalism and into capitalist society, and through a sense of its recent, strategic and pragmatic (mis-) use in insufficiently reflective practises focussed on image-creating and branding. In other words, this phenomenon, increasing in empirical importance, needs a theoretical foundation.

Artists-in-residence must be the new catalyst of the organisation through which the micro-powers related to both management and to organising can be detected by the common effort of employees and leaders. In other words, artists in residence must be both the weapon to obtain, and the ideal image of, authenticity within the organisation.

Artists-in-residence must be a movable feast inside the firm, a dynamic cabaret, exposing the pitfalls of the recent strategies of re-enchanting the organisation as the power field of extracting commitment, enthusiasm, i.e. "pathos", from any of its members. It must expose the exploitation of intensities, transferred from the hearts of the employees into the arena of a power increasingly masked as anonymity in the service of the public (the social responsible firm, etc)..

In short, artists-in-residence must be seen as a new shape which could be appropriated by the theatre of Aristotle: A critical and utopian mimesis, a stage without mercy, a performance that throws the prejudices, and hidden agendas, of organising and managing back into the faces of the members of that very organisation.

Artists-in-residence must be a permanent revolt on behalf of logos, in the service of the creating of an ethos that does not promise any catharsis.

The artist in residence must be neither the fool of the middle age king, no Ricoletto, nor a Haydn serving dinner for his feudal master. The artist in residence must be the new conscience of the firm, using beauty as a way to transform patterns of communication, and as a way to transfix new forms of stupidity, i.e. new ways of taking the buzzwords of business science for reality. Charm must educate. Humour must rebuild personalities. Sincerity must destroy shallowness and smartness through the power of a dramatic nerve that is able to unite dream and hope without inflating them through travesty. Artists-in-residence must be the mechanism that is able, at the same time, to make the members of the organisation articulate their tacit dispositional states, confront them with their dominating mood, illuminate the inner atmosphere, and, that is able to transform them as attitudes.

Artists-in-residence is a revolt against story-telling too as a new technology of branding and image-creation. It is a revolt against the staged happy ending, against the totalitarian, or "certified" narrative of the firm. The phenomenon must do homage to personal experience at any level of the organisation. To listen for the voice of the child and the drunken in the choir, neither for the soloist, primarily, nor for the professionally dedicated “bench-marker”, that is the role of the real artist-in-residence.

The artist in residence must represent the Otherness of the organisation. It is not its tacit dimension that must be brought to light - we are far more ambitious - but its shadow, the contours cast from the beams of a possible world.

The three tracks are:

1. Knowledge

Track Leader: Professor Lars Qvortrup, University of Southern Denmark

The subject of this track is the modes by which art is able to contribute to the three aspect of knowledge relevant to the organisation:

• The capacity to articulate the personal sense of personal experience inside the corporate reality, a sense manifested in a mediated doing, in an acting enriched by the media of the community itself, i.e. by incorporated decisions and dialogues, by hand of a vocabulary balancing on the edge of metaphor and concept. Such a balance can be demonstrated through words for the corporate totality like, “organism” “corporate city”, “system”, but also through words relating to the individual like “identity”, “self-realisation”, “autonomy” and “chosen heteronomy”. We want to explore the tension between the collective and the individual as a means to frame new concepts of the knowledge of social being. The artist is often able to handle this balance by uniting personal experience with collective configurations, and needs
• The capacity to share knowledge, both knowledge related to a peculiar “techné”, and knowledge related to the recognition of the Other. This capacity questions the borderlines of the corporate reality, focussing both on the development of certain corporate styles of thinking and doing, and the responsibility of being critical towards “scientific knowledge” of production, and of being and integral part of developing the cultural consciousness of society in general. Art has solved the project of transforming technology into the existential dimension, both in an optimistic, and in a pessimistic setting. The capacity to handle knowledge as a means to call upon the visions of a humanist utopia, i.e. to confront the power politics inherent in the development and diffusion of knowledge among nations, among groups, and among persons. This is the ethical aspect of knowledge management, which unite cultural institutions and corporate firms in the challenge to develop a new mode of meta-learning. This definitely underlines the role of form. How do you present knowledge in a serious way, a way that inspires to critical thinking about both its raison d’être and about its possibilities. Art was always able to empathise this aspect: The role of interpretation. Interpretation demands criticism, empathy, sympathy, seriousity, and inner harmony in the person who interprets. The firm must learn, like art, to want an intelligent and refined public.

2. Curating

Track Leaders: aladin and Søren Friis Møller

Curating must be revised. Its processes must come much closer to the construction of the social reality of the firm. It must relate to critical and ethical attitudes, i.e. to a normativity through which the relation between aesthetics and the ideals of the good and the just are articulated. Curating must not close the firm on it self through internal and external processes of branding. It must not contribute to the establishing of the firm as a rarity cabinet of expensive art, quite the contrary, curating must open the corporate reality to the world. It must become interactive, taking the stakeholders very seriously, developing a new respect of the consumer through totally new ways of addressing her. Curating must be a new way to quarantee the authenticity of public relations, as well as the right to the fulfilment of the needs of sense and beauty in the employee. Handling this task, curating must transgress the limits of strategy. It must challenge management to involve it in phenomena like recruitment of leaders, and the choice of suppliers. Curating must be the platform of a new intra-organisation dialogue of the sense of products, of producing. It must contribute to the existential climate of the firm.

3. Organising and leadership

Track Leaders: Professor Robert D. Austin, Harvard Business School and Professor Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Stockholm University

Artists-in-residence is a concept that is able to imply quite new ways of incorporating art and artists inside the firm. The tasks of the artists must be fare more than functioning as a catalysts of corporate strategies, they must be tuned in a way, in which the artist as a totally free individual is able to challenge the morals and wit of management. Such roles go far beyond coaching and mentoring, as they go far beyond the buying of a name and a tactic legitimacy by hand of management. Artists in residence must present themselves in the field of tension between being protagonists of new ways of leadership, and a revaluation of corporate values. They must defy both the roles of the jester and the mentor. If organising shall acquire an inertia of its own, artists must be the facilitators of this inertia, they must be both the generous, and the gay, the critical and the uncompromising element of a new authenticity of the corporate reality.

The tracks presented here have to be reflected through the following four spectra, sprectra through which the subject of authenticity can be further approached through an empowerment of creative thought.

The concept of “artists-in-residence” can be systematically related to the organising of authenticity through four spectra, views that definitely do not preserve the canonical perversions of this concept:

1. The event
   This spectrum deals with the process of “eventing”, i.e. with the ways in which things are happening during the process of organising. The event has a triple structure: It is about a level of obvious meaning (“pragma” in Greek, “sensus” in Latin), about a level of forces,  (“tynchanon” in Greek), and about a level (“significatio” in Latin) that cannot be grasped through interpretation without being simultaneously changed.
   
2. The relation between content and form
   This spectrum deals with identity, and, hence, with the uniqueness of the performance, of the product, of the structure, and of the pathos of the patterns of intercourse. It is about modes of existence within the organisation, and about the existential mode of the organisation itself. It does not need to imply a firm distinction between something false or superficial, and something real or deep, but it necessitates the question of a WHY? which can never be sufficiently answered through the substitution of a HOW?
   
3. The peculiar character of the genre
   The different arts contribute differently to the question of authenticity. Some might even deny the possibility of the question at all. Some genres approach authenticity at the level of form, and, hence, they try to create another sort of authenticity that is tied to contingency and manoeuvring at the surface only.
   
4. The utopia of sustainability
   This spectrum deals with the way in which art can enrich the criteria of sustainability beyond technical and – especially – economic parameters. It is necessary to ask whether the “first” and the “second” nature can be subject to a new, radical concept of authenticity? Is it possible to conceive of a “fourth bottom line”, the bottom line that does not just transcend the dichotomic character of the concept of value, but realises a re-conceptualisation of the very concept of value? 

These spectra are supposed to open to new modes of interpreting the reflective practises of the agents. Modes that reveal a new impact and density of the social forces of the organisation, and which thus are casting new lights on the elasticity and autonomous inertia of organising.

Please click HERE to download the preliminary programme.

LOCATION :

The Conference will be held at the Bramstrup Knowledge Center located at Bramstrup Manor on Funen, Denmark.

Address: Bramstrup 1, Nr. Lyndelse, DK-5792 Aarslev
Tel: +45 70 27 55 71
Fax: +45 70 27 55 78
Website: www.bramstrup.dk

Bramstrup is located close to Odense which is the largest city on the Island Fyn, and only 1½-2 hour by car or train from Copenhagen Airport.

Bramstrup Estate also hosts an Opera in June 2004 (Contemporary Opera Denmark).

ACCOMMODATION :

Special rates have been negotiated with the following hotels which are all close to the Bramstrup Knowledge Center.

• Hotel Knudsens Gaard, Hunderupgade 2, DK - 5230 Odense
  Tel: +45-63 11 43 11 - Fax: +45-63 11 43 01
  E-mail: info@knudsensgaard.dk
  Website: www.knudsensgaard.dk
  - Standard single room incl. breakfast: DKK 718 per night
  - Standard double room incl. breakfast: DKK 888 per night
  When booking, please refer to "Bramstrup - Centre for Art & Leadership".
  
• Odense Congress Center, Orbaekvej 350, DK - 5220 Odense
  Tel: +45-65 56 01 00 - Fax: +45-65 56 0199
  E-mail: adm@occ.dk
  Website: www.occ.dk
  - Single room incl. breakfast: DKK 595 per night
  - Double room incl. breakfast: DKK 795 per night
  When booking, please refer to "Bramstrup - Centre for Art & Leadership".
  
• Odense Scandic Hotel, Hvidkaersvej 25, DK - 5250 Odense
  Tel: +45-66 17 66 66 - Fax: +45-66 17 25 53
  E-mail: odense@scandic-hotels.com
  Website: www.scandic-hotels.com
  - Single room incl. continental breakfast: DKK 595 per night
  - Double room incl. continental breakfast: DKK 750 per night
  When booking, please refer to the code "LHK".
  
• Dan Hostel, Ostre Stationsvej 31 - DK - 5000 Odense City
  Tel: +45-63 11 04 25 - Fax: +45-63 11 35 20
  E-mail: info@cityhostel.dk
  Website: www.cityhostel.dk
  Rates per night including breakfast:
  1 bedded room: DKK 406,00
  2 bedded room: DKK 522,00
  3 bedded room: DKK 597,00
  4 bedded room: DKK 644,00
  5 bedded room: DKK 805,00
  6 bedded room: DKK 966,00
  You can rent bed linen dkr 50,00 incl. one towel. You are not allowed to bring a sleeping bag, but you are allowed to bring your own bed linen and towel.
  When booking, please refer to "Bramstrup - Centre for Art & Leadership".

The fees include participation to Conference, conference material, morning and afternoon refreshments, lunches, 2 evening dinners, several excursions, one opera, one concert as well as transportation from the hotels to the conference center.

Cancellations made before May 28, 2004 will be reimbursed minus 20% of the total fee. No reimbursement will be possible after that date.

Payments should be made by :

• The following credit cards: Visa or Eurocard/Mastercard/Access

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