ABSTRACT
In a paper given at the First Critical Management Conference held in Manchester in 1999, Christopher Grey presented the thesis that, given the falling into disrepute of Marxism and the offering of only a relativist cul-desac by post-modernism, the way forward for meaningful critique could be found in a turn to aesthetics. The succeeding conference included a stream devoted to aesthetics, and several books have now been published exploring the development of an aesthetically informed method of understanding management and organizations (Strati, 1999; Linstead and Höpfl, 2000; Carr and Hancock, 2003). This I find somewhat ironic for, as I have shown in Chapter 2, one of the foundations on which management’s discursive house is built is its claim to be an art. While aesthetics is not reducible merely to art, there is a certain irony in turning management’s claim to art back on itself and challenging it with the judgemental tools offered by the arts. This, Koontz and O’Donnell might chide me, is an elision, for I am here defining ‘art’ not in the way they had meant but narrowly, as the production of (beautiful?) objects for appreciation, and indeed I will in this chapter be narrowing the definition even further as I will be borrowing for my analysis arguments from within only that branch of art devoted to painting (hereinafter referred to as ‘art’). My riposte to Koontz and O’Donnell is that in choosing one aspect of the arts I am not transgressing the managerial domain by critiquing it with something from an incommensurable domain for, in its wilful refusal to define what it means by itself as an ‘art’, management opens itself to a critique from the arts, however defined.
