How do we approach a tension between what we want from other people, and what other people want from us? This tension takes form in countless ways across society: in a businessperson who sells customers something that she wouldn't buy herself, in an artist who is frustrated by how an audience interprets his work, in an investor who needs to stop financing a young company that is not performing how she expected. These moments of compromise are challenging, illuminating, and ultimately inevitable. Here is how three successful creatives devised unique methods for balancing compromise and integrity.
The Tension of Integrity and Compromise
Before examining these three methods, let’s consider the tension between compromise and integrity more precisely. Mark Rothko, the legendary abstract painter, successfully maintained his artistic integrity, but had a crippling distrust of the art audience and market. Rothko wrote that the modern artist “prefers hunger to compliance,” and this is often the road he chose (3). Rothko’s rejection of a major mural commission is representative of how he navigated this tension.
In 1958, the powerful Seagram family commissioned Rothko to produce thirty large paintings for their new Four Seasons restaurant. In many ways, the commission was similar to the Vatican hiring Renaissance master Michelangelo to paint another lavish and flamboyant forum for the elite, the Sistine Chapel. To boot, the Seagram contract did not stipulate or restrict what the paintings should be. Rothko knew that Michelangelo faced the same struggle for integrity as he did, and loved the master’s comment that success required that he “in stupid Grandeur’s praise, be loud, /And to the errors of the ignorant crowd /Assent with lying tongue” (2). Despite this, Rothko considered that modern artists faced more obstacles than their Renaissance counterparts. He believed that a classic authoritarian society with defined standards and a limited elite was simpler to operate in than the free market that imposed endless contradictory demands. Yet handed the Seagram’s Renaissance-like commission, Rothko rejected it.
Rothko suffered for this inability to find mutually-beneficial compromises to grow his audience and cultivate his market. “A painting lives by companionship” with a sensitive audience, but also “dies” in front of one less generous, Rothko once warned (xix). Had he been able to strike a balance and find a place for his vision in the market, it may have eased some of the personal struggles that intensified his isolation. Rei Kawakubo, by comparison, understands that the integrity of her artworks and cultivating a market for them is not mutually exclusive.
Method 1: Rei Kawakubo's brand symbiosis
Create an ecosystem in which your uncompromising output is symbiotic with your commercially successful products.
You may not have heard of Kawakubo before, but you have likely come across her fashion house, Comme des Garcons, whose revenue tops $300M/year (BoF). She has been the singular creative and business visionary behind the label since founding it 53 years ago and she is one of the most important fashion designers in history. Kawakubo's goal when she started her company in 1969 was to sell her Comme Des Garcons runway collections.
These runway collections are revelations that peel back the excesses of fashion to show the anxieties of insufficiency and privation hidden behind. Clothes that she says “one must think about, search for, sympathize with, and struggle to wear” (quoted). The trouble with these collections is they are quite intense and often impractical to wear. “When we really put our thoughts into a piece,” she notes, “it will become difficult to wear in some aspects” and the brand “needs people to be OK with that and wish to wear it despite that” (quoted). Kawakubo recognized her runway collections could not support a thriving business on their own, so she created an ecosystem in which her uncompromising creative output became the blueprint for a variety of more market friendly products.
At Comme Des Garcons (CDG), Kawakubo's high fashion line secures the cultural stature of her brand and sets the tone for her 17 other lines, including the successful CDG PLAY line of t-shirts and sneakers branded with wide-eyed hearts. Kawakubo is a businessperson through and through and states that “new interesting business ideas, revolutionary retail strategies, unexpected collaborations, nurturing of in-house talent, all are examples of Comme des Garçons’ creation” (quoted). Each of these 17 lines is an attempt to answer a specific market’s demands, but Kawakubo stresses the importance of balancing such compromise with bold artistic integrity as key to building a strong and durable brand.
Marketing-driven creation has no place at CDG: Kawakubo warns that “When you work based on your (prior) achievement... you won’t be able to see ahead of you” (quoted). It is essential to not strictly judge a product on its prior performance, or on its performance in marketing trials. Kawakubo says this is both because the market can change in unexpected ways, and because even items that do not sell may be “necessary” and “powerful” and convey the brand's values to the market. “Of course, we will make products that are sellable,” she assures, “but we also need to value those that aren’t” (quoted).
Kawakubo is not alone in this conviction, as Bernard Arnault, CEO of Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, shows us. He asserts that a marketing-driven approach “has nothing to do with innovation, which is the ultimate driver... of growth and profitability” (quoted). Luxury margins depend on selling people the unexpected: what customers do not yet know they want. Arnault listens to marketing tests “with only one ear.” He uses them to weed out products with no market traction and to alter marketing (like product names in foreign markets), but never to modify products or predict success. For example, LVMH launched the fragrance Flower by Kenzo “because the team believed in it” even though participants in market tests “did not know what to make of it” and it was an incredible success (HBR). In the first 6 months following its release, the entire Kenzo Fragrance Group’s sales rose 75%.
Arnault's method for new products is to pick “the right creative people” who ultimately “want to see their designs on the street,” give them “complete freedom to invent,” and then translate that invention on the runway into products that will sell (HBR). Like at CDG, LVMH brand collections sets the tone and aesthetic for each of those brands. For example Dior's Spring 2000 Couture runway collection featured dresses made of newspapers. These obviously would not sell to a broad market, but Arnault was unfazed. The dresses got people's attention and created the concept for what became a highly successful line of ready-to-wear garments with a newspaper print.
Method 2: Paul Thomas Anderson's bait and switch
Lead with products that have immediate mass-market appeal and then carry your market into less charted territory.
The celebrated film director Paul Thomas Anderson's approach to this balance was to kick off his career with films that were sure box office hits, and then use his stature to move into more experimental territory. Doing so allowed him to access a wide audience, that allowed him to build a core fan base which then followed him to his later films. It also allowed him to build a reputation among film studios to raise the capital he needs to execute his large productions and work with great actors. We will only briefly examine Anderson’s “bait and switch” method because it is more obvious than Kawakubo and Koon’s approach.
Anderson's big break came with his second feature film, Boogie Nights (1997), a true recipe for success. The film is star-studded, fronted by Mark Wahlberg and Julianne Moore, and follows the story of a rising porn star in dizzying cocaine-fueled Los Angeles of the 1980s. Anderson knew this movie could be big: in an interview promoting the movie, he commends the porn film Deep Throat for returning $100M and only costing $10-20K (quoted). Boogie Nights returned nearly 300% on its $15M investment, and launched Anderson's career proper. After Boogie Nights, he made less conventional films with far less sexy leads: a stoned private investigator, a dressmaker, a quiz show host, etc. All of his these films have been critically-acclaimed, and continue to attract large audiences despite their more obscure subject matter. Anderson successfully launched his career by culling mass-market appeal, and has leveraged his status and reputation to now pursue any subject that captures his interest.
This is not unlike Celine Halioua's strategy in founding Loyal, a biotech startup that aims to extend dogs' lifespans. While several startups are confronting the problem of human longevity head-on, starting with dogs is compelling because there is far less regulation that will restrict Loyal from conducting research and eventually bringing a product to market. That research, and the revenue flow of a canine longevity product, would then position Loyal to broach the problem of human longevity with more leverage and resources than most startups in the human longevity space (Halioua).
Method 3: Jeff Koons' market affinity
Align your core interests with those of the market and create products that simultaneously reflect and sell into that market.
Jeff Koons is a divisive figure in the art world who many claim is more motivated by money than artistic contribution. The truth is that the two are merged for him, and his core artistic interests are aligned with the consumerist drive of the market. He has been very successful and broken world records for most expensive artwork by a living artist three times in the last 15 years. The latest winner, Rabbit, sold for $91M in 2019 (WSJ). His most famous artworks are sculptures of this type: enlarged stainless steel reproductions of common decorative objects and toys polished to mirror perfection. The art world generally rejects mass-produced consumer objects because they have none of the sensual, subjective, and emotional depth they seek in an artwork. Koons might agree with that, but he loves these objects for how they are used in society: to bring people joy and a hope of brighter days, even if only superficially.
Koons traces this interest to his middle class upbringing in a Pennsylvania suburb, where he recalls seeing neighbors put gazing balls in their front yards as a way of “being generous to their neighbors” (quoted). Koon's earlier work was critical of such objects. For his “Luxury & Degradation” series, Koons made shiny reproductions of decorative liquor paraphernalia (like a train-shaped Jim Beam decanter). His aim was to draw a parallel between the “desire for luxury products to the cravings of the alcoholic who wants alcohol” (quoted). His later work dropped the moralism and embraced the optimism of desire.
For Koons, not judging desire is an act of self-acceptance. The artist hopes that his work encourages “people not to reject any part of what they are” and instead “blend together everything they are and move forward” (quoted). He wants people to engage and appropriate everything, all realities and possibilities- “no matter what is is, it's okay-I can use it” (quoted). This is not necessarily because Koons' personal values or behavior changed, as he recently stated, “personally, I’m not really a shopper. If I go to a store...I want to study the alternatives and the various possibilities. I contemplate rather than shop” (quoted). By aligning his interests with this consumer desire and approaching it without judgments, he has made work that at once distills the wanton desire that is the beating heart of the market, and sells right into that market.
We have looked at three distinct ways in which compromise and integrity can be mutually beneficial. The figures we dove into are extreme. In their own way, each transformed this challenge into an opportunity for learning and success. They are rare examples of how to thoroughly balance your core motivations with those of the market. We may not be able to craft the symbiosis of Kawakubo, deploy the timing of Anderson, or find the affinity of Koons, but understanding how they navigated this tension offers us practical insight that is applicable across industries.