Before everything is decidedThe artist inside the company

Over the past thirty years, the commissioning process has gradually turned into a sort of assembly line. An objective is defined. A brief is written. A supplier is selected. A result is delivered. Each step reduces the uncertainty of the previous one until, by the end of the process, everything becomes predictable: timelines, costs, language, impact, even audience response.

It’s no mystery why this has become the dominant model. We live in a defensive economy, driven by caution and full of fear. It demands results before it’s willing to take risks. And so uncertainty ceases to be a generative force and becomes merely a problem to be controlled as much as possible. We keep talking about innovation while, in practice, we’re mostly training ourselves to minimize damage. We want to change everything without giving up control, without relinquishing power, without truly shaking the deeper layers.

On those salty afternoons, by contrast, we had stopped waiting for something to happen. As if staying in one place long enough possessed the transmutative power to alter the very premises of an idea. To let chaos in.

But why, today, do artists almost always enter the scene when everything has already been decided?

They’re asked to produce a campaign, an exhibition design, a film, a show, a capsule collection, a performance. They’re asked to make memorable something that already exists.

It’s a model that works precisely because it doesn’t question a thing. The company continues making the same decisions; it simply runs them through more sophisticated frames. And here, for me, lies the misunderstanding at the heart of the contemporary relationship between art and business. We keep debating whether it’s right or wrong for brands to work with artists. It’s a legitimate question, but probably secondary. A different question should come first: at what point in the decision-making process should an artist be invited in?

Because an artist’s value isn’t defined by the images they produce. Designers, photographers, filmmakers, and creative agencies already do that remarkably well. An artist becomes indispensable much earlier. Their real work is to challenge the premises: to ask whether the problem itself has been framed correctly. They’re trained to deviate, to generate possibilities, not to choose among those already available.
If artists are only invited in at the end of the process, that expertise becomes completely useless. Which may explain why so many collaborations between brands and the art world end up looking alike: no surprises, just more bling bling.

But it would be too easy to place all the responsibility on brands. The art world itself has gradually internalized this role, often mistaking collaboration for decoration. It’s a comfortable position, but rarely the one where an artist’s contribution becomes truly necessary.

And yet, if we look back at some of the most compelling cases of the twentieth century, a different pattern almost always emerges. The collaborations that stand the test of time are not the ones where an artist merely lends their imagery to a company. They’re the ones where artists were invited in early enough to reshape how that company thought about itself.

Perhaps that’s also why we continue to talk about Olivetti as an exception. Not because it commissioned better work than others, but because it understood that value begins long before the final work is created. It begins by allowing designers, artists, writers, or architects to knead the company’s culture long before its representation takes shape. Another example along these lines is The Third Place, the advertising campaign David Lynch created in 2000 for PlayStation 2, where the American director seems to delve deep into the brand’s unconscious.

The same holds, in very different eras, for many of the companies we now consider culturally significant. Not because they invested more money in art, but because they began treating culture not as a communications department, but as a genuine decision-making infrastructure capable of steering innovation itself.

We keep inviting artists into the wrong rooms. We give them the openings, the campaigns, the product launches, the design weeks. But almost never the meetings where it’s actually decided what a company will become five years from now. And yet that’s precisely where their presence would generate the most friction. Perhaps we don’t need more art inside companies. We need artistic practices to start inhabiting the places where decisions are made.

I stay seated on the towel for a few more minutes, waiting for the sun to fully emerge. Maybe I’m just telling myself this story because I need those months to make sense. I wonder if there’s such a thing as a reverse Rayon Vert.

My gaze, lost in a gradient from pink to blue, lingers once more on the wreck. We’ve both been here for twelve years. Separated by a mirror of water standing in for the sky.

I’ll be heading home soon. The sand beneath my feet is already dry.