episode 9 – experimental and conceptual innovators | David Galenson

Resources and links

• David Galenson’s home page
• Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity – David’s famous book
• Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art – David’s following book
• Muhammad Yunus, the economist turned entrepreneurs turned Nobel Prize winner
• Chronicles – Volume one – Bob Dylan Memoir
• The painter Sam Francis

Transcripts

[00:00:19] His name is David Galenson and his book is “Young geniuses and old masters”.  Welcome David.

[00:00:25] David Galenson: [00:00:25] Thank you very much.

[00:00:26] Nir Hindi: [00:00:26] Well, David is a professor in the department of economics and the college of the university of Chicago. He has been a visiting professor at the California Institute of technology, MIT the university of Texas at Austin, he is the academic director of  economics at Universidad del CEMA in Buenos Aires and his unique research field, the economics of art, you might have heard David that Malcolm Gladwell podcast, Revisionist History.

[00:00:55] And today we actually have the chance to dive deep to some of his unique revelations that you will hear in a second. David, first of all, thank you very, very much for taking the time to speak with me and share your amazing and insightful discoveries that as we talked made me even understand better where I am.

[00:01:17] David Galenson: [00:01:17] It’s a pleasure. I love this work. I had an experience very much like you, this work helped me understand my own processes of research. And I just, I love talking about this with people who are interested in it.

[00:01:28] Nir Hindi: [00:01:28] So David, maybe you can share with us actually what attracted you to art? Why you have this connection with this world of art as an economist?

[00:01:38]David Galenson: [00:01:38] I’ve always loved art.

[00:01:38] My grandfather was a painter and he died before I was born, but my mother loved art because of him. And she took me to museums when I was a kid and I just loved them. I also, I had an aunt and uncle who were art collectors in New York city. And when I went to New York, I just loved going to art galleries and museums with them.

[00:01:54] So, I mean, art has just been a part of my life. I grew up with my grandfather’s paintings, you know, they were all over our house.

[00:02:01]Nir Hindi: [00:02:01] now you have this background in the world world, but what is your main research study?

[00:02:08]David Galenson: [00:02:08] Very few people understand this. I mean, very two of my colleagues understand this, but to me, this is all part of the same research project.

[00:02:15] I have a PhD in economics. I’m an economic historian by training and in my early work early work, I mean several decades. I always did a particular kind of research where I had, I created data sets based on, observations of large numbers of individuals, right. And it so happens that I mostly studied bound labor in colonial America.

[00:02:37] So I had data sets made up at 25,000 denture servants, a hundred thousand slaves and so on, but it was always studying in some fashion, the careers of individuals. And, and so this work came sort of seamlessly. I mean, I’ve always looked at the relationship between age productivity and this is just another illustration of that.

[00:02:58] Nir Hindi: [00:02:58] And this illustration tell us briefly before we dive deep into it, because I think the story, how you got to this actually is interesting.

[00:03:06] David Galenson: [00:03:06] It was a very specific episode before there was art Basel before there were all these art fairs in the world. It was art expo in Chicago and galleries would come from all over the world and I love going to it.

[00:03:17] And so I think it was 1987. I was a, I wanted to buy a small painting by an artist named Sol Lewitt from a New  York dealer with the unlikely name of Gracie mansion, right ?  the small painting and art expo and it’s so happened that LeWitt’s business agent was a very old friend of my cousin. And she had made me promise, never to buy any of his work without talking to her.

[00:03:38] So I called her. She asked me how large the painting was, what the price was and then she immediately said, that’s overpriced. We’re selling that size for less. And I said, yeah, but you’re selling new ones. This one’s 10 years old. And she said, it didn’t matter. Well, you know, for 20 years I’d been studying the relationship age productivity and it doesn’t yeah.

[00:03:57] Stay constant over people’s lives. And so I thought that was very bizarre. And so I looked for literature and I couldn’t find a single study on the relationship between age productivity for painters. So I set out to do that using auction data, we put a lot of auction records into the computer for, you know, we took 20 years worth of data for roughly two dozen contemporary artists.

[00:04:18] Nir Hindi: [00:04:18] And what were your discoveries from this research?

[00:04:22] David Galenson: [00:04:22] For each painter, we estimated a regression equation in which the price of the painting was a function of the artist’s age when he or she had made it. And then we control the size of the painting when it was sold and so on. And these turned out to be the most surprising results I’d ever seen because the painters divided into the first half was not particularly surprising for about half the artists, the price increased with the age at which they had created the painting that wasn’t terribly surprising, but for about half the artists, these were great artists, very famous artists. The price was positively was sorry inverserly related to age. So as they got older after their twenties, in some sense, they were actually getting worse.

[00:05:04] Now, no economist had ever found this relationship for any activity, you can find it for athletes, but painting and Olympic swimming are not comparable activities. So, you know, this was an enormous puzzle. And I, you know, I, thesis advisor was a very famous, it was a very great economic historian. He always said, it’s when you get a result, you don’t understand that’s when you have a chance of learning something.

[00:05:27] So I went about trying to understand this, and my instinct is to study individuals. So I started studying these artists individually. And I discovered that there was, there were systematic differences between the people whose prices went up with age down with age, they had different goals and they used different methods.

[00:05:47] Nir Hindi: [00:05:47] And you defined it as experimental and conceptual innovators. And that was, I think, kind of the, aha moment. When I read the book,  we will dive in deep into it in a second. It’s kind of reflected in the world of entrepreneurship, but before they don’t want to ask you, what’s it, what is conceptual innovator? What is experimental innovator and what defined them?

[00:06:08] David Galenson: [00:06:08] Conceptual innovators want to communicate ideas or emotions. Right? And your ideas are your own and your emotions are your, your own. You can know them completely. And as a result, they can know precisely what they want to do. They have very specific goals for their work.

[00:06:25] So, I mean, I’ll talk about this for painting, but the other disciplines, you just have to sort of change that, you know, the technology. So painters can make and conceptua artists. Almost do. Almost always do make preparatory sketches for their paintings. Now they do them in the computer very often, but it’s the same thing before they make the work.

[00:06:44] They know exactly what they want it to look like. And there are a number of things that follow from that their innovations typically appear suddenly and completely again, it’s the idea. That’s the contribution. And so they can be embodied in individual breakthrough work throughout the history of art.

[00:07:02] The most famous paintings are disproportionately made by conceptual innovators because they announced major innovations. Now there’s the relationship with age that’s where I started now. New ideas say, well, they can come any time cause they come very quickly. But it turns out that the most radical new ideas and therefore the most important.

[00:07:21] Usually arrive when the artist is young, it’s not actually chronological age that matters, but chronological age, and experience in the discipline are usually highly correlated. Most people start an activity like painting when they’re young. And young painters are the ones who just disproportionately conceptual innovations because they haven’t had time to develop fixed habits of thought.

[00:07:43] See for conceptual motivators, fixed habits of thought are the enemy because they constrain you in trying to think of dramatic new ideas and that’s why young innovators in any discipline, physics, art, you name it tend to be young people.

[00:07:58]Nir Hindi: [00:07:58] they are trying to escape the box, as we say, kind of think outside of the box in what they are doing, whether it is art or science, as you mentioned.

[00:08:07] David Galenson: [00:08:07] I mean, the funny thing is that they very often say they don’t even see the box. I mean, somebody asked Bob Dylan. You know, if he had consciously broken the rules of popular singing and he said, I didn’t even see the rules. And that’s a very common refrain because they’re very young, they’re inexperienced and these are iconic class.

[00:08:24] These are revolutionaries. Revolutionary is not just a metaphor. I mean, political revolutions are not created by old people.

[00:08:31]Nir Hindi: [00:08:31] So can you give us some examples? So you speak about the fact that first of all, conceptually innovates is actually are more focused on the idea, rather than may be on there. And materials, they do a lot of preparation and are trying to kind of escape, maybe old tradition, maybe don’t even know the old tradition just to create something totally new, totally different.

[00:08:51] Give us some example for those conceptuals innovative.

[00:08:55] David Galenson: [00:08:55] My classic example of a conceptual innovator, you know, I started studying painting and turned out this is one of the great conceptual innovators of the 20th century in any activity. I mean, I, you know, when I started this project, I would have said Picasso was the most important painter of the 20th century.

[00:09:08] Now I would actually say it’s the most important artists of the 20th century. We can talk about why that is, but he said, I don’t paint what I see. I paint what I think. Right. And experimentalists are visual in some sense, whether they’re painters, novelists, economists, you name it. Right. But he said I don’t pay what I see a paint, what I think.

[00:09:26] And so, for example, I mean, and say, well, that’s just, those are just words, right? No, they aren’t. His most famous innovation was cubism and it really illustrates the statement. In a Cubist painting we don’t simply see people from one point of view as I’m looking at your face. Right. That’s an, that an experimentalist would paint what he sees.

[00:09:45] Right. In fact in cubism, we see people from many points of view. So when Picasso did a portrait, he said, look, I’m looking at your face, but I know there’s a back of your head. I can paint that too. My work is based on knowledge. So when you look at a, at a, at a Cubist painting, it has all these little pieces and it’s as if I took photographs of you, I walked around you taking photographs.

[00:10:06] I cut them up and I stuck them together. So you’ll see a face, you’ll see an ear, you’ll see the back of the head. And so on. This is an art that expresses knowledge. It shows people in the round, right. Impossibly right? There, there are a number of figures that because are created that are impossible.

[00:10:24] Now, you know, again, the youth Picasso made his most important painting Mademoiselle D’avignon  which is in the museum of modern art in New York. Yeah. It’s 26 years old that announced the arrival of cubism. So that penny makes the point, you know, it makes several points here. One is, you know, you talked about preparatory works, but Picasso wanted to create a masterpiece.

[00:10:44] He wanted a Matisse at that point was King of the Hill. He was somewhat older than Picasso. He was the great painter and he had just made a big splash with a very large painting, “The Joy of Life”. And, but Picasso was very jealous. So we spent an entire year making preparatory works for the Mademoiselle. This is a young painter.

[00:11:03] I didn’t have a lot of money, spent a year making something like 500 or 600 preparatory studies for the Mademoiselle, the largest number of preparatory studies for a single painting ever made in the history of Western art. And it did produce a masterpiece deliberately that painting is now the most important painting of the 20th century that appears in something like 95% of art textbooks that cover that period.

[00:11:26] No other painting appears in more than half, but it also makes this point about impossibility. Because for example, the Mademoiselle is five nude female figures. The one furthest on the right is a squatting figure. you see her from  her body from the back. You see her face from the front. That’s impossible.

[00:11:46] That’s knowledge, human beings can’t swivel their heads 180 degrees. That was making the point. I, I don’t paint what I see. I paint what I think.

[00:11:56] Nir Hindi: [00:11:56] You mentioned that it’s not only the most important painting of the 20th century. You mentioned that in your opinion, Picasso is the most important artist of the 20th century I’m interested.

[00:12:05] Why do you think he is the most important painter of the 20th century?

[00:12:08] David Galenson: [00:12:08] One of the issues that I had to deal with when I started this project was this is about in a sec. One question was. What makes a painting valuable? Why are some of the, why are the peaks of some of these, these painters early and some late?

[00:12:20] Well, once you start to realize art historians, don’t like to stay things simply. They don’t like it when I do, but if you read their texts, you’ll see that they understand the good ones that an important painting doesn’t depend on beauty or anything else. It depends on innovation. It’s doing something new.

[00:12:39] So the peak of the age price profile is the artist’s most innovative work. Now the Mademoiselle is an innovation. It’s a radical innovation. It’s the most radical innovation that Picasso made in his career. Again, introduce cubism, introduced all these new ways of, I mean, it’s, it’s innovative both in this idea that you can look at people from points of view simultaneously, but it also introduces this personalized view of the world, artists are no longer constraint.

[00:13:09] I mean, for centuries and centuries, the idea of a painting was the painting was supposed to be a window on the world. Picasso said, no, this isn’t a window. In the main lane. Yeah. So, you know, and then more, mostly liberating thing for young painters.

[00:13:22] Old painters said, this is disgusting. This is disgraceful. He’s desecrating art. The young painters said I’m free.

[00:13:30] Nir Hindi: [00:13:30] Yeah. I remember I just read the book about the story of “The painting that changed the world” and one of the colleagues of, eh, I think it was Derain that said, eh, Picasso, so to say to another friend, I hope that one day we won’t find Picasso of hanging himself, there was so doubtful about the attempt that he had, that they thought he was going to kill himself because he won’t be successful.

[00:13:52] David Galenson: [00:13:52] It was a reference actually to this novella that we had talked about earlier, before this interview started by, by Andre de Balzac. Its called the shade off. He had no masterpiece in which the artist’s failure to complete a painting did lead him to kill himself and to burn his studio. But that’s a misunderstanding that was an experimental painter painter, Hoffer in the Balzac was experimental for Casa would never have hanged himself.

[00:14:17] He was always satisfied with what he did, but you know, I digressed and I didn’t answer your question. I can answer it very briefly. Why do I consider Picasso of the most important paid artists, the 20th century and the extent of the importance of a painter? Or a novelist or an economist depends on the extent of your influence.

[00:14:36] Picasso changed painting.

[00:14:38] Right? Virtually every art movement of the 20th century was either following Picasso re-acting to him. So he, he changed painting, but it didn’t stop there. He changed the novel. He changed poetry. He changed cinema. For example, how did he change cinema? For example, Eisenstein was tremendously excited, but I thought I was the greatest living movie director.

[00:15:01] He was excited by cubism. The idea of cubism facets. It breaks things up into little pieces, right? The average shot length of a Hollywood movie at the time was about 10 seconds. Eisenstein. Cut it to about a second. And this was under the inspiration of cubism. The Waste Land by TSL is a poem that broke with traditional rules of continuity, right?

[00:15:22] New speakers come in without explanation it’s jumbled. That was a, that was a direct consequence of the editing of Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound was a great poet, was a close friend of Gertrude Stein. He knew cubism in Paris. Elliot had no interest in cubism, but it was Ezra pound who put that into the wasteland.

[00:15:42] Then, for example, in the novel. Now what’s generally considered the greatest novel in English in the 20th century, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Um, every chapter is in a different style. Again, that’s that that idea comes from Picasso. See, another aspect of this, of the, the conceptual innovator is a conceptual and a better kind of body, a new idea in a single work.

[00:16:06] And he can be perfectly pleased that he has expressed that idea. So he can change to another idea. And because he did that frequently, so here he is influencing the novel, uh, cubism influenced architecture. You know, I grew up in the, in the 1950s and sixties, the, the advanced architecture of the time was these skyscrapers were made up of concrete boxes, placed on top of each other.

[00:16:30] That came from De Stijl in Holland and De Stijl was directly influenced by the fastening of cubism and on and on. Right? Picasso influenced more other artists of all kinds by far than any other artist of any kind in the 20th century.

[00:16:48]Nir Hindi: [00:16:48] Obviously I guess that many of the listeners can relate to conceptual innovators and understand conceptual innovators in relation to the young and age in ideas, et cetera.

[00:17:00] But I think what struck me with your book is actually the other type of innovators, the experimental ones. Explain us a bit about the experimental. I, because I think in a way, as I mentioned at the beginning, when I read about experimental innovation, it kind can was an aha moment.

[00:17:17] David Galenson: [00:17:17] Well, the problem is that we’re brainwashed.

[00:17:20] Because the popular image of creativity is this momentary flash of genius, you know, in comic strips, the light bulb goes off. Yeah, exactly. Um, and it’s certainly true. It’s more conspicuous, right?  conceptual innovations are dramatic. They’re celebrated immediately. they instantly change people’s lives.

[00:17:40] And one of the clearest expressions of this Francois Truffaut, he was 16 years old in Paris. He saw “Citizen Kane” and he said in that moment, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. Right. That’s conceptual innovation. It’s done suddenly and it’s, it’s clear. He understood immediately. And it’s also true that the conceptual innovators are almost always these young brash people who will tell you that they’re geniuses. And so they, you know, they, up from the rooftops, this is an innovation, I’m a genius. And in many cases it’s true. Picasso said that Orson Wells said that Dylan said that and on and on. Right. But there’s this other very quiet form of innovation. And these people have the opposite personality.

[00:18:27] They’re always saying I haven’t done anything very important. Cezanne is the quintessential experimental innovator. At the end of his life. He was saying, “I’m not satisfied with my work. I haven’t really accomplished nearly as much as I wanted”. The point here is experimental innovators are not interested in ideas, but in vision perception in general, right?

[00:18:47] Vision for painters, but then perception for novelists.  they want to paint what they see, what they experience. Now. That’s not a precise goal and notice, see conceptual innovation is generated in your mind and you can, you can know your ideas completely. But of course we all know we can’t experience the outside world completely.

[00:19:07] I mean, there’s this, exercise we do in the United States, when you line out fourth grade or something, the teacher says would take a half an hour, just write down a description of this room. And of course, then the point is you can’t. You’d spend your entire life describing the room and you’d never come to the end.

[00:19:22] It’s you know, because basically perception is, is infinitely complicated. So these artists are never sure what they want to do in terms of translating their vision to, you know, to two dimensional canvas in this case. They were tentatively and incrementally. This is why they call them experimental. The first experimental and the Oxford English dictionary is trial and error.

[00:19:44] So they rarely feel succeeded. Their careers are often dominated by the pursuit of a single goal because you can’t quite get there. You can never, Cezanne said “I can’t realize” these artists repeat themselves. They do the same thing over and over changing it very, very gradually right there. They’re very cautious.

[00:20:03]they rarely make preparatory studies of any kind because they want to make discoveries. In the process of working and again, not just true for painters but it is true for Novelis. Experimental as an experimental novel has changed their plots as they were, poets changed their works and so on.  these people tend to improve with age because they build their skills.

[00:20:26] they improve their abilities gradually as they work.

[00:20:30] Nir Hindi: [00:20:30] So you just spoke about, because of doing his breakthrough at the age of 26, and you spoke about Cezanne, what age Cezanne did his own breakthrough?

[00:20:40] David Galenson: [00:20:40] There’s no single masterpiece by Cezanne, if you asked a dozen art history professors, what’s the greatest painting Picasso ever made, unless they were deliberately trying to be perverse, they would all say to oneself.

[00:20:52] I mean, you know, if you ask the same dozen professors, the greatest painting by Cezanneias is on the 12 different paintings. Right. There’s no one Cezanne on masterpiece, there are series of paintings. the thing he loved the most was the landscape of his native Provans. He loved the monks at Victoire. He painted it something like 50 times over a period of 30 years, but the views that are most likely to appear in textbooks of art history are the very latest ones.

[00:21:17] So once he made, he died at 67, the ones he made from 64 65, 66, 67. Those are the most fully developed, or he would have said, realized

[00:21:28] Nir Hindi: [00:21:28] so far one point, do we have Picasso at the age of 26? And from the other point, we have Cezanne at the age of 64, 65, 66, such a huge difference in age between the different breakthroughs.

[00:21:41] David Galenson: [00:21:41] They were born in 40 years apart, but they did their greatest work within a two year period.

[00:21:46] Nir Hindi: [00:21:46] Wow. Yeah. I remember that because also got inspired by Cezanne approach to reduce the painting to the tree element.

[00:21:55] David Galenson: [00:21:55] Yeah. Again, the conceptual conceptualists are simplifiers cause I’m would have hated. If anybody said there are three key elements of your painting it to him, it was an ensemble.

[00:22:04] You couldn’t separate things, but the conceptualist simplify things very much.

[00:22:08] Nir Hindi: [00:22:08] Can you give us more examples for painters

[00:22:11] David Galenson: [00:22:11] you’re in Spain? Um, two of the greatest experimental painters in Western history with Velasquez and Goya, I guess you would say Velasquez, right? Yeah. Um, if you walk through the product, you see why they were great experimentalists.

[00:22:26] Nir Hindi: [00:22:26] Why describe it to our listeners? I have the great fortune to be able to go to the Prado on my weekends, but why Velasquez and Goya were experimental?

[00:22:37] David Galenson: [00:22:37] They painted real  people. Right? If you walk through the Prado, you’re not looking at idealized people. You’re not looking at symbols, even in the religious paintings, Velasquez, see experimentalists tend not to make religious paintings because they don’t believe in symbolism, but Vasquez early in his career had to paint to make money.

[00:22:54] before he became the close friend of the King, you had to paint religious figures. Even the angels are not imaginary. So if you look at a Raphael, he painted perfection. Yeah. Women who are not real they’re they’re imaginary. I mean, he wrote to a patron once and he said, um, I’m doing an altarpiece for you.

[00:23:11] I haven’t found a woman beautiful enough to sit for the virgin, but it’s all right, because I have an image of a perfectly beautiful wound in my head, but Alaska has never painted our families. It is a conceptual. Great. Yeah. Yeah. And see Velasquez. I mean, even the famously, the King

[00:23:29] it was it Phillip the fourth something. Yeah, Phillip the fourth was the one that they were very close to going to school guys, but at some point he stopped having Valasquez pain and because it, it, it hurt him too much to see himself aging in Velasquez his paintings. Now Rafael simply would have continued to paint him as a young man.

[00:23:47] No problem for Velasquez, we do that even, even for his friend and his patron, right? Then Velasquez again, go to the product. It’s great. Masterwork. He painted Las Meninas when he was 57 years old. To me, not as great as painting the greatest paintings were to come later, you know, but if you walk through those wonderful rooms up to that, you’re seeing real people, you feel you can, these are people that you could know.

[00:24:10] And you know, the same thing is true of Goya. If you look at there’s a wonderful, small self portrait he made at about the age of 60 and here he was the greatest painter in the world. He consorted with Kings and aristocrats. He painted himself in very plain clothing as a real person. You could imagine, you know, sitting down in a bar.

[00:24:29] And, and, uh, and started to talk to the guy next to you. And that could have been going up and going and made these amazing black paintings when he was in his sixties. And one of the greatest, you know, the greatest of these trucks when Goya was 82 years old, he made a drawing of an old man with a long white beard walking with two canes.

[00:24:48] And the caption is “I’m still learning”. That’s the credo of the experimentalists. And he was here. It’s true. His art never stopped changing. Conceptually it’s very often become the captives of their early work and they just keep themselves over and over experimentalists. Don’t great ones, Velasquez, because his work is always changing, you can see that if you look at the dates of the pendings and the same thing is, is very much true when we, when we made the black paintings, these are horrible paintings.

[00:25:17] They’re horrible subjects and he suited the technique to the work, but technique is crude. Not because he didn’t have fine technique. You can see that anywhere else, you know, in the Prado, but because he wanted to show the crudeness of these people and he did it with these very crud brushstrocks.

[00:25:36] Nir Hindi: [00:25:36] Yeah. David is by the way, my favorite paintings by Goya, because nobody can stay still.

[00:25:41] When you see this painting, you can hate it. You can love it, but there’s one thing for sure. You have a reaction to it, such a strong paintings. Wow. So, so you spoke about Velasquez and Gloria is experiment. Do you have more Spanish painters does that you will consider them as conceptuals beside the Picasso.

[00:25:59] David Galenson: [00:25:59] Well, you know, more, more recently one Miro, um, was an experimentalist and again, there’s an evolution in his work and he talked about the fact he wrote letters when he was young and he said, “I don’t want to find my style”. Too young, because style constraints you. I want to evolve. I want to get better. As I get older, the artists, he most admired were people who got better as they got older.

[00:26:23] Nir Hindi: [00:26:23] Would you consider Dali as a conceptual?

[00:26:25] Highly by

[00:26:27] David Galenson: [00:26:27] Dali made great work when he was in his twenties and then his work?

[00:26:32] Nir Hindi: [00:26:32] Yeah, he basically did. I remember he did at his sixties. He did a commercial for medicine or something like this.

[00:26:39] David Galenson: [00:26:39] Yeah. I mean, he virtually stopped being a serious artist. It’s ironic because he was actually, no, he was expelled from the surrealist movement by Andre Britt’s home because he was a sellout.

[00:26:50] He lived about 50 years too early. Andy Warhol did exactly the same thing. And Andy Warhol is the most important artist of the second half of the 20th century. And Andy Warhol is fascinating Dali, by the way. I mean, Dali was sort of, he was, uh, he couldn’t be. Uh, taken seriously by important artists, but Warhol made no of the fact he was fascinated by Dali.

[00:27:10] He always made a point when Dali was in New York of going and seeing him. Um, so, you know, our attitudes have changed, but Dali in his lifetime was considered a sellout. Uh, Andre Berto made a, um, what do you call it? You know, you, you rearrange the letters of someone’s name and there’s an, is it an anagram?

[00:27:29] I can’t remember. Salvador Dali became “Avida dollars”.

[00:27:33]Nir Hindi: [00:27:33] It’s true. So before we continue, I want to add to speak with you about experimental and conceptual innovation in the world of business and entrepreneurship. Let’s take a short break.

[00:27:49] Thank you very much for coming back. We just spoke with David about experimental and conceptual innovation. Now why I think this book was kind of a revelation for me. I’m involved in the world of startups and technology and entrepreneurship for many, many years. And obviously we see the same pattern in a way, mainly the same pattern of conceptual innovation.

[00:28:12] And Steve jobs is famous to say that if by the age of 30, you didn’t do something important, most likely you wont do. And I think this kind of perception discourage. People to kind of try and build something when they are forties, fifties, and older in their entrepreneurial aspiration. And I wonder, David, do you see the same pattern in the world of entrepreneurship disability to have experimental and conceptual?

[00:28:40] David Galenson: [00:28:40] Absolutely. I mean, not only are there the two types, but they understand it. I mean, very often the conceptualist don’t recognize the experimentalists and vice versa. But they understand which type they are. In fact, I mean, you mentioned Steve jobs. Steve jobs normally understood that he was conceptual in my language, but he actually learned from, from prior conceptual innovators.

[00:29:02] See the thing that distinguishes Jobs most clearly from all of these other billionaires in Silicon Valley was not the magnitude of his innovations, but the sheer number. Right. Invented the iMac, the iPad, the iPhone, the iPod, and they all serve very different purposes that wasn’t just, you know, windows 2.1 windows 2.2 windows 2.3.

[00:29:27] He made fun of windows for that for always doing the same thing. Um, they did very different things. This is, again, this is like the Picasso changing styles or Bob Dylan changing styles. And in fact, see, as you said, job’s was afraid of losing his creativity, did a famous interview. When he was turning 30 and he said, you know, everybody knows that you don’t do anything creative after 30.

[00:29:50] And he said only chance is to avoid this. Comes from people like, and he mentioned specifically, Bob Dylan and PebblePad Paso. He said that you have to keep trying new things. He said, you know, that’s dangerous. Cause you may fail. If you keep doing windows 2.1, 2.2, you’re going to make a lot money and you’ll never fall on your facial never embarrass yourself. But he said the real integrity of an artist is to keep changing. He said Dylan and Picasso were always in failure and that was his credo. That was very, very, you know, explicitly what, what he wanted to do.

[00:30:25] Nir Hindi: [00:30:25] So you mentioned a beautiful anecdote. Actually, Steve Jobs was very inspired by Bob Dylan and in Bob Dylan memoir, he actually spoke about Picasso and it’s actually how all the three of them are linked together.

[00:30:39] David Galenson: [00:30:39] Yeah. Dylan understood this as well. If you read it, Chronicles volume one, his memoir, he talks about the fact that as a young artist, In as a young singer in Greenwich village, when he first arrived there, he read in the newspaper. Picasso had just gotten remarried for the fourth time at the age of 85. And John said, this is somebody who never stood still.

[00:30:59] He kept changing and said, that’s the way I want to be. And he was, he would, you know, Dylan, Joyce Carol Oates, the writer said Dylan changed so much from album to album in style and voice and even in appearance that he must be a fictional character. He couldn’t be real. And in a sense, he was a fictional character.

[00:31:19] He was a creation of himself. This wasn’t, you know, people like Pete Seeger would say, you know, the folk singer said, know, Dylan’s not sincere. He’s not authentic. Joni Mitchell’s famously said that she’s, you know, another popular singer. Um, nobody knows what the real Dylan is like. Right. Because he, he creates what these personas.

[00:31:41] No persona came. It’s the term that comes from the masks that actors wear in Greek tragedies. To show you whether they were happy when they were sad and so on and their masks you put on. And so it’s, you know, Dylan is an example of somebody who creates persona it’s to keep people at Bay. He quotes constantly from other people, what was his real language?

[00:32:01] And there’s a debate about whether there is such a thing.

[00:32:04]Nir Hindi: [00:32:04] I read few of your articles on the Huffington post and you started to relate to it also to our perception of the job environment that we love success. And we love the youth and we love the young ones that are creative and inspirational and innovative.

[00:32:19] And we often tend to forget about the older generation. And it’s very common that at the age of 40, 45, they tell you, okay, I don’t, I’m not sure what I can do with you, but you actually claim something different. And I want to hear your take on it.

[00:32:34] David Galenson: [00:32:34] As you see in our society, there’s this very long standing belief, not only in society at large, but even among the academic experts who have studied creativity are psychologists.

[00:32:42] And if you read their work, they will say creativity is for young people. Wisdom is for old people, but wisdom and creativity are opposite values and that’s false, right. But many false beliefs like this one have led to discrimination. And again, this one is no exception. Um, in the 1960s and American medical doctor named Robert Butler, coined the term ageism to call attention specifically to this form of, of discrimination.

[00:33:13] And it, it, you know, it was, it was a parallel to racism and sexism. Um, but naming something, it doesn’t get rid of it. So Silicon Valley suffers very, very much from it. you can still find, you know, famous. Innovators in Silicon Valley saying, you know, we only want to hire young people because they’re the innovative ones, but this is a very powerful assumption.

[00:33:37] It’s very hard to get rid of, but it’s false.

[00:33:40] Nir Hindi: [00:33:40] So we do, we should not forget the experimental innovators, the one that take years to get to successes.

[00:33:46] David Galenson: [00:33:46] Yeah. I mean the Warren Buffett’s of the world, um, or the Ray Kroc, Ray Kroc was the fender of McDonald’s. Right. And see, it comes out of their experience.

[00:33:55] Warren buffet has, he talks to somebody who owns a company. He evaluates them personally in 15 minutes. It’s his intuition, which is wisdom, which is knowledge it’s judgment. Ray Kroc was a guy who delivered. He was a delivery driver. He drove, he delivered refrigerators to restaurants and he was always annoyed by the fact that he couldn’t get a quick lunch, you know?

[00:34:17] And so as the guys in that kitchen is all the time he invented McDonald’s and it was purely experiential. It wasn’t some, you know, immediately it wasn’t some theoretical discovery. It was a purely empirical one. It was a practical matter.

[00:34:29] Nir Hindi: [00:34:29] Yeah. I think the founder of KFC was the same that a group of great entrepreneurs that started after the late fifties or the mid fifties.

[00:34:39] So David, I wonder what makes it conceptual innovate or successful?

[00:34:44]David Galenson: [00:34:44] conceptual innovators need to make these sudden discoveries, right? The way they do that is by simplifying problems, um, to focus on, as you said, a very few essential elements. And then, you know, come back to Steve Jobs. Steve Wasniak said, Steve jobs didn’t do one circuit design or piece of code.

[00:35:07] He didn’t have the technical skills, but he was the one who had the ideas that he found other people to make them. Job said when you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really, really do anything. They just saw something. So the, the point here is they’re making connections among things that weren’t previously connected.

[00:35:29] And it’s easier to do that when you don’t see the complexity, you see something very, very simple. Again, Orson Welles was asked, how could you make the grid latest movie ever made when you, your first movie? So you’re 26 years old and he said, innocence, innocence, innocence. And he said, if that doesn’t work for you, try ignorance, ignorance, ignorance.

[00:35:50] And he used to talk about, you know, he said, if you’re walking along the edge of a cliff, Um, if you look at the, you know, if you look at the, the void on the side, you’d be terrified, but if you don’t even know the void is there, there’s no problem. , Steve jobs used to use to say, well, in Buddhism, there’s the concept of the beginner’s mind.

[00:36:10] He said, it’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind. And that’s this innocence, it’s this ignorance. Right? So conceptual innovators, they come to a new problem and they see some radical new solution that nobody would have dreamt of. If they’d studied the problem for 20 years because it’s something completely out from, you know, we saying from left field

[00:36:31]Nir Hindi: [00:36:31] it’s interesting what you said about the conceptual innovators are able to kind of take unrelated things and simplify it and it’s kind of go back to some of the ideas that I have around intersection of disciplines in a way, you know, our education system in our job environment, we are so focused on specializing that we are very good in what we are doing, but we don’t see outside of our realms. And that’s in my own humble opinion, kind of reduce our ability to make these unrelated connections.

[00:37:06] David Galenson: [00:37:06] Yeah. The conceptual innovators, the people who, again, they’re these young, I kind of plastic people who sort of ignore their teachers in that sense. They, they learn the history and, and, you know, so Steve jobs knew the history of the markets that he studied, Picasso knew art history and sign out, but it’s, it’s, I think the best, the best single statement about that.

[00:37:28] This was a critic and Peter woolen made the same event. John Luke Godard. Godard, again was one of these iconic classic young geniuses whose first movie breathless was the most important thing he ever did. And Wallin said that there’s this paradoxical thing that you find in Godard. That he had this enormous reverence for the past.

[00:37:49] He knew he was encyclopedic in the history of movies, but he had a complete unwillingness to follow its conventions. He broke every rule. And this is, I mean, you see this art after art, I mean, Picasso based, he would have told you, he’d said Cezanne was his God. Right. So he’s not, he, he immediately took Cezanne.

[00:38:09] Cubism came from Cezanne,  and cubism and  fauvism, Matiesse’s Fauvism. Same thing, another radical conceptual innovation. They’re both. They would have both Picasso and Matisse these come from Cezanne. But if Cezanne had seen their work, he would have hated it. But it’s the irony is that their work is what made Cezanne the most important artist of his time, because that’s influenced.

[00:38:33] He changed the way artists make paintings, but this is what I think of as the protean nature of innovation. Um, conceptual innovators take from the past in ways that the people who made the art never would have intended and would have hated in most cases.

[00:38:47] Nir Hindi: [00:38:47] So we talked about what makes conceptual innovators successful.

[00:38:51] I want to know what makes experimental, innovativor successful?For the experiment that innovate those that are listening to us, what they need to keep in mind, because I think the former one a much more famous.

[00:39:04] David Galenson: [00:39:04] The experimentalists have to realize. And very often they have to swim against the current in this.

[00:39:08] They have to realize that they’re marathoners so that in many disciplines, there’s this pressure to do something different. I mean, I felt that when I was young, you know, a teacher of a teacher of mine who really had my best interest at heart, but really misunderstood my work. He said, you have to finish your dissertation and then do something completely different.

[00:39:26] Well, that’s good advice for conceptualists, but it’s exactly the wrong advice for experimentalists it’s as if, you know, you wanted to win an Olympic marathon, you hired a coach who was a sprinter, and that might, that person might have the best intentions of the world, but training somebody to win a sprint, it’s not the same thing as training to win a marathon.

[00:39:43] So what experimentalists have to do is to understand, they have to resist the temptation to compete with these young conceptual innovators who are getting ahead. And they’re not. Because the success of an experimental is depends on deep understanding, understanding a product understanding of market, uh, that they accumulate over time.

[00:40:06] I haven’t studied many innovators, but, but a wonderful example of a very great experimental innovator who did exactly this was Muhammad Yunus, right? He was originally from Bangladesh. He got a PhD in the United States. He went back to Bangladesh when it became independent, he was excited about statehood and he became the chairman of the economics department at his undergraduate alma matter and should have gone.

[00:40:32]But in 1974, there was a devastating famine in Bangladesh. And he said, my, you know, classical economics could not explain it.

[00:40:42] And it was very, very graphic. I mean, he said, you know, the people were very quiet. They were very well behaved, but you come out in the morning and people would have simply died in the street. And he was at wit’s end again. He said these wonderful Hollywood movies didn’t bear on the reality. He saw around him.

[00:40:57] So in desperation, he went into a nearby village and he said, the people of Joe bruh would be my professors. So now at the age of 35, he said, the poor taught me an entirely new economics. He just went to people and said, what are your problems? And out of that came a completely new form of thinking. by trial and error, he said he invented micro – lending.

[00:41:20]and it’s interesting because he showed that it was successful in his village of job where he just let these tiny amounts of money to these villagers, but it turned out it freed them from the clutches of money lenders who were seizing their profits, right. Cents a day, a few, just a few pennies a day, but he said he couldn’t believe that made the difference.

[00:41:37] But when he saw that it was successful, he would just win very, very small amounts of money to these women who were making these baskets. And their repayment rates were 99%. So then he went to a bank and he said, look, you guys are in the business of banking. You’ve got to take this over and make these loans.

[00:41:52] And they said, we can’t do that. That’s ridiculous. They won’t repay the loans. He said, they do Rebeck loans. It’s empirical. But they said, well, there’s no paperwork. It’s not worth doing paperwork for 20 cents a day. Right? So they refused to break the rules of banking. And so he had to do it himself. Right. So he expanded at the age of 40.

[00:42:13] He quit his job as a professor and he was sad to do it, but he realized he had to, and he invented that he founded the Grameen bank, which went on to become the largest bank in Southeast Asia. And for which he was the Nobel peace prize.

[00:42:26] Nir Hindi: [00:42:26] Amazing.

[00:42:27] David Galenson: [00:42:27] And he said, I just did this step by step. I didn’t want to do it.

[00:42:30] I had to do it. I didn’t know. Some of the steps were right. Some of them were wrong. It’s just, and he said again, the poor taught me an entirely new economics. This is not a theorist. This is somebody wanted to be a theorist. He was a very mediocre economic theorist. He was a very great experimental innovator.

[00:42:47]Nir Hindi: [00:42:47] David I have a question – do you think it’s easy or is it possible to move between types of innovations?

[00:42:53] David Galenson: [00:42:53] It’s almost impossible. I say almost cause there are a few cases. See, a lot of people change from one type to the other. In the course of what I call with writers, they call this finding your voice. You start out as one and then you discover that’s one.

[00:43:07] Cezanne, for example, as a young painter was trained in art school and X to make preparatory drawings and then. To make final paintings, but then he went to work with the sorrow and he discovered that the true Cezanne was, was experimental and he never made prepared drawings, drawings. So in that sense, people change, but that’s really just, you know, education.

[00:43:25] There are very few examples of people, you know, people say, wow, I want to be conceptual. And I’m young and, and experimental. And I’m old. The problem is these are differences in the way you think conceptualists are deductive. They’re theorists. They see the world in black and white in very simple terms.

[00:43:42] That’s what allows them to make these radical changes and what robs them of their creativity. As they got older, the world necessarily because becomes more complex and they can no longer cut through the complexity. That’s the problem as experimentalists for just innately they see the world in shades of gray and for somebody who sees very new nuanced differences. It’s almost impossible to simplify to the extent that you need to, to, to be a conceptual innovator. So it’s very, very rare that anybody can change from one to be up there.

[00:44:16] There are very few that I’ve found three cases in the history of Western art, but people who did make important contributions early as conceptual and important contributions late.

[00:44:28] As experimental, but the circumstances are, you know, almost impossible to replicate. You can’t consciously say I’m going to do it. There are many, if, for example, in economics there, I think theorists who realized that they’re not going to make important contributions is to get on in their thirties. They try to become empiricist, but they’re usually very bad empiricist because they want to force data into these molds.

[00:44:51] They can’t see the complexity of, of empirical analysis. So they’re not there. They become a but very bad ones.

[00:44:57] Nir Hindi: [00:44:57] So the recommendation

[00:44:57] basically for every experimental. Every innovator will learn who you are and maybe focus on that. If you are experimental, give yourself the time, understand that you are the marathon runner, you are part of the, the one that will take it step by step.

[00:45:14] And yes, maybe we’ll create a great company. Not in your twenties, not in your thirties, but in your forties, fifties, and maybe even your sixties, David, we’re getting into the end of our conversation, but there’s fewer a few more questions I want to ask. One of them is that you open my mind and my eyes to a, something that you said, you said about how you study out of this passes in why you think we need to do the same in the business world.

[00:45:40] Can you, can you elaborate on that? Because it was really a beautiful observation. Or how are they actually can help us develop new ways of thinking that relevant to our businesses?

[00:45:51] David Galenson: [00:45:51] This came from personal experience and it was sort of accident. Um, again, you know, I loved art. I was an economics major in college, but when I was a senior in college, it was a tradition of my university.

[00:46:01] You wrote a senior thesis and mine was on the economics of the Texas cattle drive. I’d love doing it every afternoon. I was in the library, microfilms from Texas and Kansas newspapers and it was very time consuming. But the flip side of that was at the university. There were courses that were known to be very easy courses, but very entertaining courses for seniors.

[00:46:19] And I took two wonderful art courses as a senior. It just opened my eyes. You know, I find it knew a lot about art growing up, going to museums. Um, and one of the things that I realized now is that studying the history of painting can show us innovation much more graphically than in any other activity, because there’s this immediacy to it.

[00:46:44] I mean, you know, we can talk about a great innovation in Ulysses the novel Ulysses or in TSL. It’s the wasteland. We have to talk about it. We can’t hold 500 pages novel in front of us. Right. But in these art history courses and the same thing is true in economics we can’t hold an entire article in front of us, literally, um, and understand the contents, but in an art history course, they put up a painting on a spring.

[00:47:12] And it’s a painting. You can say, I know this artist, I know that painting. And then I discovered the, the lecture could show me things in that painting that I’d never seen, literally things that they would call your attention to. And I discovered also you put up a painting by an artist that I didn’t like.

[00:47:34] If the Lecturerer and these were two exceptional lectures, these were wonderful art historians. I discovered they could make me like, any painting that they loved. And the, the reason about it was that I said innovations are combinations of previously unrelated elements. Well, you know, I still remember there was an entire lecture on the mademoiselle d’avignon you know, this great painting by Picasso and two of the elements. There, there are elements of Cezanne on that. Come from the fastening. The individual brush strokes of Cezanne on become the fastening, the breaking up of these forms of cubism. But at the same time, there are these African faces. Well, both they can show you that you can point to those.

[00:48:15] They can show you a painting by, by Cezanne. They can show you how that leads to the fastening. They can put up an African mask and they can show you how that leads. So they’re not just telling you, they’re showing you. And it’s very, very powerful to see this in front of you. Right. So that’s an example of how, you know, and for example, for experimental innovation in very rapid, or you can go through 20 Cezanne views of Mount Savick war as if it’s a newsreel.

[00:48:41] You notice if it’s a sequence and you can see the change over time, you can see it. So, you know, again, it’s wonderful when the literature professor would describe how Earnest Hemingway style changed over his career. But the immediacy of seeing this is just much more powerful and there’s, there’s no other discipline where you have this, they call it pleasantness in art history.

[00:49:01] You can be present in a way that you can’t in other disciplines. So that’s, that’s an example of why I think, you know, the history of painting is a particularly good one for seeing the difference. Foreseeing what innovation consists of, but then also for seeing the difference between experimental and conceptual innovators,

[00:49:17] Nir Hindi: [00:49:17] and then you spoke about this ability to dissect a painting for that matter or a product for that matter to its basics and actually understanding the innovation.

[00:49:28] Of each part of it. And that’s a practice that you said, unfortunately, we don’t do enough in the world of business, dissecting it to its core element of innovation, not necessarily what is constructed or made of, but what led to the innovation in order to understand better the product and the services around us.

[00:49:50] David Galenson: [00:49:50] It’s something you realize when you, when you studied the history of art, because scholars of art make their, they make their living. By by telling you, showing you what is new in these paintings, the bad ones don’t they don’t understand it, but the really good ones can say, look, here are the specific innovations of Andy Warhol, right?

[00:50:11] You know, the soup cans or this radical innovation. Why will this mechanical reproduction? Right? That’s one. Their serial. He make, he makes a series of the same images that’s two. Um, and it’s based on photography, right? Those innovations changed art. If you look today, I mean, in 1950, there were no major works of art based on mechanical reproduction.

[00:50:39] Now they’re all over the place, right? If you go to gallery, if you go to 100 galleries in New York city, 50 of them we’ll have works either using mechanical reproduction or based on it.  seriality you’ll see, 20 of those galleries will have serial works. photography photography was a minor art in 1960 today. It’s a major art paintings based on photographs would be in 75 of those hundred galleries. And that dates for Moore hall. Then nobody ever does anything by themselves. There were other artists doing the same thing. Warhol is the leader, and those are the specific innovations that Warhol made. And again, you can see them.

[00:51:15] We don’t have to argue about them. We can just walk in the gallery and say, we can, you know, if there’s any question we can say to the dealer, does he paint from photographs? The answer will be, yes.

[00:51:25] Nir Hindi: [00:51:25] I love it there, the way you connected art history classes in business analysis of innovation, uh, David, who is your favorite artist?

[00:51:35] My favorite

[00:51:35] David Galenson: [00:51:35] artist is a relatively minor abstract expressionists named Sam Francis. Um, he was from the Bay area. You ended up, you lived in Paris for a time, but he was a graduate of the university of California, Berkeley. Yeah. I grew up, my parents taught at Berkeley. My, my mom always took me to, to show us that they at the university art gallery and one of the shows, it turns out what I subsequently learned the mid sixties.

[00:52:01] It was the first museum show that Francis had ever had. And it came to the Berkeley because he was a graduate. He was an alumnus of university of California. And I’d never seen anything like it. I mean, he painted these abstract blue forms. Um, they were entirely new to me. I thought they were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.

[00:52:19] And the, the funny thing is now 50 years later, I still believe that. I still, I still think his art is among the most beautiful things that have ever been created in Western civilization.

[00:52:31] Nir Hindi: [00:52:31] And I remember that when we talked and I asked you about James Turrell, Because Turell is one of my favorite artists.

[00:52:37] And then apparently both of them work together in the studio, in Santa Monica. So I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that also connect both of us. That one of my favorite artist that is work with your favorite artist. So maybe there is superstitious connection.

[00:52:54]David Galenson: [00:52:54] It’s another thing that’s true of business. It’s true of art.

[00:52:56] Collaboration is now more and more important in, in scholarship. It’s more and more important, I think in business and it’s even becoming more important than art and the fact that Turrell and Francis collaborated, one of the things they collaborated on, turns out with the sky paintings. And I never understood that.

[00:53:11] And Francis has work. They would rent helicopters and have them trail. Basically smoke various colors out and they would create paintings on the sky visual thing. It doesn’t last for as long as something you have to see. And it turns out they collaborated on this. Turrell was interested in environmental art in white Francis was interested in writing on the sky.

[00:53:32] So they were both experimentalists and in art experimentalists, collaborate conceptual with collaborate, never the Twain shall meet. Right. You don’t experimentalists and conceptualists don’t collaborate because they would constantly run into the constitutional problems. They would argue. Let’s not do that.

[00:53:49] Let’s do this. So, whereas Turrell and Francis get both say, we’re trying to create some visual effect on the sky. How do we do it?

[00:53:57] Nir Hindi: [00:53:57] I think the project, eh, Roden Crater of James Turrell really started it in the seventies and it’s still not completed. And he expect to complete it in the next 10 years. I think it’s a great example for experimental that have a vision and just go with it for the next 50 years.

[00:54:13] David, one last question. What is the role of the artist in your opinion?

[00:54:19] David Galenson: [00:54:19] I, you know, that’s a very difficult question. I think my only answer. Yeah, it would be personal. Um, there are, I mean, you know, somebody said it’s sort of bizarre in the 21st century that people would still be putting paint on canvases, what a crazy thing to do.

[00:54:35] and you know, I’m not a philosopher.  and in this sense, I’m not even an economist. There are just many, many people who love art. And it’s also the case that it has one of the oldest traditions among the arts. And there’s, you know, it’s my experience like when you look at a San Francis, somebody, you know, my friends will say, Oh, you know, my kid could do that.

[00:54:58] Now. They couldn’t. I mean, when I see a Sam Francis, I just compare it. I grew up, I grew up Chinese food was the big treatment. I was a kid. Right. You know, we’d go to Chinatown in San Francisco, but for some reason I’d never had mushi pork. I don’t know, dunno regional thing or what, but when I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts going to school, went to a restaurant and I had moshi pork with a friend and I couldn’t believe how good it was.

[00:55:23] I thought this was, is an extraordinary thing. And I knew just from seeing the perfection of it. This wasn’t something that restaurant embeded, you could see, you have this sense. There are centuries of tradition that we do this and there are in Chinese cuisine. And that I feel the same thing. When I see a great painter today, there are these traditions.

[00:55:43] Um, so no people don’t like it. They’re free not to look at it, but there are these people. I really love these things.  the saddest thing for me this year about the pandemic, I,  I had to cancel a trip to Madrid and I miss seeing the Valasquez.

[00:55:59] It’s just how I feel. I can’t wait to get back to Madrid to go to the Prado.

[00:56:03]Nir Hindi: [00:56:03] I can’t wait for you to visit, then we can meet and see art it together. I will look forward to it. Maybe. Thank you very, very much. I think that to kind of summarize. This conversation. I w I want to use two quotes, one of Suzanne, and why not?

[00:56:19] Because, so that will maybe articulate the whole conversation about experimental and conceptual innovativors.

[00:56:25] Cezanne said, “I seek in painting”. Picasso said, “I don’t seek. I find”, I highly recommend all of you to read the book of David “Young geniuses old” masters. You will see it in every discipline of the art from film to poetry, to novelist,  to painter the how those two types of innovators are influencing our life.

[00:56:48] And think about for yourself. What are you experimental or conceptual

[00:56:52] David? Once again. Thank you very, very much.

[00:56:56] It was really a pleasure. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Stay tuned for our next step is out until then. Have a great day. Thank you.