Philosophising about art and making sense of the nonsense —With Rob Estreitinho
By: Harriet Kindleysides
Tags: Marketing, Art, Philosophy, Brand Strategy, Creativity

Part 1 (of 3)

One of the things I love about working in the world of communications and creativity is finding the sweet spot between disciplines, ideas, and culture. But even more for me it’s the collaboration and brilliant minds I get to meet and mash ideas with along the way.

So for this bumper edition of ‘A Strategist’s Guide to Art’ I’m excited to have a guest on board.

Rob Estreitinho is best known for his awesome newsletter Salmon Theory which looks at the links between philosophy and strategy. He is also Marketing Director of Group Think – an international learning community for Strategists. Rob and I have been having online geek-outs about our areas of interest, and how it helps us in work and life for a while now. So we decided it was about time we had a proper chat about it.

This is part one of a series which we’ll be doing over the next few weeks. We’ll be waxing lyrical about what art and philosophy can teach us about the evolution of culture, becoming better strategists, finding calm in the chaos and more.

Hope you enjoy!

HK: Welcome Rob! We both write and lean towards the worlds of philosophy and art — why do you reckon that is?

RE: Well, there’s probably a few things. Philosophy helped me reconcile with some burning questions I had growing up. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time overthinking things. So when you see something that shows you that a) overthinking is normal and b) that it’s been done for thousands of years, you can probably learn a thing or two from that. So when I started realising that some of these philosophers were thinking about similar things, I felt like I’d found my crew.

Suddenly it’s not just me — there’s books about this stuff. I’m not a freak. That’s great.

So that’s kind of how it started for me. And then the more you get into it, the more you keep looking. I tend to look at things at a more systemic level before moving to the individual level. So I started finding it really interesting as a way to think about how systems, groups of people and societies work. And that that’s probably also a good starting point to understand how to do better communications. What’s the connection there for you?

HK: I’d agree with that. At their heart, art, philosophy and communications are about a meeting of people and culture. I grew up surrounded by art, design and creativity. So from a pretty young age, I used to look at these great works of art and felt some sort of connection to the people and time in which they were made.

I’ve always been kind of fascinated with the intricacies and context of it. The way that you can see something on one day, and see it in one way, and then look at the same thing a different day and see something completely different. Equally, how it changes depending on your mood, the more you learn about the story behind it, and whether you see it in one gallery or another, alone or with others, in a book, online or in real life.

In a lot of ways it taught me the value of really looking at things — that you shouldn’t just accept a single point of view as fact.

RE: That’s interesting, looking at the history of it. Do you find that you better understand the work of art once you start looking its historical context? Because sometimes you look at art and you go, “I could do that”. But then if you look at the background of it, that there’s often more to it. Is that something that you always need to go through? Or is it more of an instinctive thing for you?

HK: A bit of both. I think you can get yourself into knots around feeling like you have to know everything about something in order to understand it. But actually, that instinctive reaction to things is equally useful.

For me it comes down to two things: 1) what you take from it, and 2) what we think the artist meant by it. Which equally changes depending on who’s interpreting it. So that’s why it’s useful to look at it in two ways. It’s an exercise in thinking and looking at different points of view — and understanding how your perspective might shift once you peel back the layers. But I don’t think that is necessary in order to appreciate it.

I also think there’s a lot to be learned and applied to how we live today from looking at art. And its natural relationship with philosophy means that in a lot of ways it has a continual relevance which evolves over time. The ideas stay, but their relevance shifts and changes depending on the context and time in which they are viewed. There’s a comfort and reassurance in that.

RE: Yeah. Also, if you look at things in a wider view, you get a sense of constant ebb and flow. I feel this with philosophy and when reading about art, but I’m not sure that’s how everyone sees culture evolving.

If you see something growing it’s easy to go “right, everything’s going to be like this in 10 years”, but actually, things work more like a pendulum. At a basic level, you can say “everything in the West is progressing towards individualism. So everyone’s going to be super individualistic in 50 years”. But what’s probably going to happen is you’re going to have some people like that, and then the countercurrent of people who say “maybe collectivism has something going for it too”. And both will probably coexist because they always do, it’s not a monoculture thing!

So I think it’s always more interesting to look at things as pendulum swings, than just a straight arrow with an end point. Things never seem to happen like that. Do you see the same dynamic happening in art?

HK: Absolutely. It’s interesting because on the surface you can say things move in a linear fashion. But whenever you look at a moment in time, particularly in philosophy or the arts in general, there’s always competing movements. There’s always someone fighting against what’s gone before. But then you see it kind of come back again in a different form 20, 50, 100 years later. That kind of natural shift and change between things is how people and ideas evolve. Because it gives us a platform from which to learn from; you’ve got a precedent which has been set before, and then you either agree with it or you don’t.

Both art and philosophy are by their very nature driven by people and culture and a natural reaction to the time which they live. So there will always be themes that ebb and flow and re-emerge over time in different ways.

For example, we have spoken about the Renaissance before and you referenced the way that Humanism and the Age of Enlightenment came after people started questioning how benevolent God was following the Black Death. But then that was followed later by the Pre-Raphaelites, who opposed the promotion of High Renaissance ideals. And Impressionism, which was followed by Post-Impressionism – as a reaction against Impressionism. And it goes on and on.

There’s always this kind of pendulum swing in everything. Where at one end you’ve got movements which oppose existing ideas, and at the other ones which evolve and build upon them.

What I think is interesting at the moment is that you are seeing ideas and themes which existed 100 years ago, reappearing today. So for example, Dada used absurdity as a reaction to the horrors of the First World War. It was a response to crisis. Now it’s themes are re-emerging in different forms — in meme culture for example. And I like that kind of yin and yang. It’s how ideas evolve, how we learn, how we grow and how we develop.

RE: Do you remember the first time you realised things might be less linear than we assume?

HK: For me actually it has nothing to do with art. I was really interested in fashion and culture when I was a teenager. And I started thinking about the idea that you’d call something “on trend”, yet it’s also often an evolution of something which existed before. But it’s taken on a new kind of relevance. And that got me thinking about how that relates to all different aspects of culture. You start to see themes emerging — the more you get to know something and the more you uncover things. How about you?

RE: It’s hard to say. Moving to London about six years ago probably accelerated my need for philosophy. Although there’s a lot of glamour about changing your life and moving countries, it’s emotionally very hard. Philosophy was an escape from that, a way to try to deal with that.

But then it also started giving me other things to think about. For example, most of my life I thought there was always a “best way” to do something. And yes, there are very bad ways of doing lots of things. But what I’ve been trying to learn is that you have good enough ways of doing something, and each of them always brings a trade-off. So for example, coming to London: best thing I’ve ever done for work. The trade-off: certain relationships that are not as close. I’m still close with friends back home and every now and then we speak on the phone or video call, but we’re not physically together as much. And the relationship will always be there, but it also takes a bit of a toll.

That’s one example that helped me realise that whatever you do, you’re always gonna have a trade-off of some kind. And this is interesting because it helps you realise that although some decisions may be better than others (from a net benefit point of view), there’s always going to be competing point of view, which may be equally valid.

Could I have stayed in Portugal and probably enjoyed the good enough career? Yeah. But I chose not to, I needed something more. As long as you’re aware of what you’re gaining, but crucially what you’re letting go or sacrificing, that’s probably a useful enough way to make decisions. As opposed to always assuming you need to optimise everything, because otherwise you never do anything. It’s analysis paralysis.

HK: That’s the paradox of perfectionism, isn’t it. If you’re always looking for what you think is going to be the perfect solution, you never do anything. Naturally you end up being drawn to certain things rather than something else. That kind of push or pull is where sometimes you just have to go with stuff and see what happens.

Thanks Rob!