Engineering Creativity: The Corporate “Artist in Residence” and Experimental Management in the Cold War Era
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History of Art
First Advisor
Lee, Pamela
Abstract
In the 1960s–70s, dozens of US corporations in the industrial and incipient technology sectors hosted “artists in residence” (AIR), where contemporary artists pursued ambitious projects on corporate campuses using company equipment and resources. Relationships between artists and their corporate colleagues ran the spectrum from rewarding to acrimonious; these programs have received comparatively little scholarly attention or have been characterized as anomalies. This dissertation argues instead that artist residences are significant encounters, as corporations sought to instrumentalize artists as symbols of their newfound commitment to a defining social value of Cold War era: creativity. As such, the artist in residence advances a conceptual link between the cultural identity of the artist and the social function of innovation. The three chapters that follow trace AIRs from their prehistory in the 1950s through their peak in the late 1960s and finally to their wane in the mid-1970s. Chapter 1 presents an intellectual history of creativity via its emergence in postwar management theory, which laid groundwork for artist residences by establishing an interdependence between artistic behavior and technological innovation. Chapter 2 offers an industrial reading of R. B. Kitaj’s 1969–70 residency at Lockheed Corporation, identifying how company executives publicly justified disastrous financial risk-taking via aesthetic appeals to innovation. This equation between risk and creativity, I argue, is evident in a close reading of artworks produced on-site. Chapter 3 revisits Bell Labs’s historic artists-in-residence program by focusing on one of its last iterations in the mid-1970s, that of musician Laurie Spiegel. This chapter reconsiders how Spiegel’s computer-generated compositions engaged with information theory via the managerial framework of the monopoly’s “one system, one policy, universal service” credo. Together these case studies present the arc of the artist in residence, tracing an aesthetic history of creativity on its ascent to becoming a core value of capitalism in the late 20th century.
Recommended Citation
Hunter, Lucy, "Engineering Creativity: The Corporate “Artist in Residence” and Experimental Management in the Cold War Era" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1067.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1067
