Proof of the pudding?

At the Robinson's Juice session we spoke about the difficulty of communicating and asked whether it was possible to create a shared, cross-disciplinary meta-language.

I thought it might be useful to delineate fundamental characteristics of business, academic and artistic worldviews. I'm focusing here on difference.

Business ideology is delineated by the marketplace. The ultimate value-test is the transaction. Supply and demand cohere around an agreed price and that provides a practical demonstration of value. This means that, for business, reality is rooted in the practical. Business thinking consequently focuses heavily on outcomes, action plans, targets etc. Ultimately it doesn't matter how you get things done. The pertinent question is whether you can advance your version of reality through real, transactional behaviour. Do people buy your product?

In the academic world, the value-test is built upon the foundations of the discipline. This often (though not always) implies adoption of a scientific method. You present a hypothesis, test it through some commonly accepted mode of enquiry, then draw conclusions and present the results. The results are assessed according to various axioms accepted in the academic comunity; the value of the output is judged in these terms (eg peer review, number of citations). Successful academic research impacts on the discipline when it is absorbed by the academic community. What's at stake here is whether you affect the intellectual landscape. The first issue is whether your method & conclusions stand up to rigorous enquiry, next comes the question of whether you are extending or reframing the debate.

The value-test for art resides in the extent to which an existing body of knowledge is problematised. Take impressionism: a great art movement at the end of the 19th century, but this way of looking is now embedded in how we see the world. Impressionist paintings no longer carry the artistic charge they once did, they've moved from being challenging artefacts to chocolate box decoration. I think this is true at the cultural level, but it doesn't describe an individual's encounter with a specific painting. That's another matter and art is deeply personal.

I want to suggest that every successful artwork acts like a nugget of psychological gristle - it burrows away at your psyche, changing you in the process. Work that succeeds doesn't offer answers but continues to throw up relevant questions (the gristle doesn't get digested). So a measure of artistic success is the extent to which the work stays with you, its continuing ability to question (your) accepted views of reality.

How do these different concepts of 'value' and 'success' impact on our use of language?