My name is Rainer Ganahl.  I am Austrian born. I studied art, fine art, at the academy of Dusseldorf in Germany, in Vienna and Paris. I came to the United States in 1990, and I have been in the United States, in New York City since.

Collaborative projects are best when everybody is happy, and when things are properly sorted out, when responsibilities are clearly discussed, clearly divided, when everybody knows, they, he, she, they have to do. When all other issues of money, costs and rights are discussed up front so there is not a fight afterwards. Needless to say, after all, even if you have sorted it out, the most important thing for the success of any collaborative project is that the work is good. It needs to convince. You know, you can have the most well thought out, most interesting, best financed piece and if it just doesn’t appeal, it is just not good, then it is not good artistically. So, in the end what counts is how good it is. There are projects where people literally rip other people off, and yet if the project is great, nobody cares. 

In the case of Alfred Jarry, I wrote about him. He wrote this piece, this Ubu King, and it was a collaborative project in high school and it was made by two brothers and by Alfred Jarry, so three people wrote it together. Then Alfred Jarry took it from a provincial town, we are talking the end of the 19^th century, and went to Paris with it.  He took ownership of it, he reworked it, he carried it around all his life and it is his project. Needless to say, if in the beginning there are definitely other partners involved. That is Alfred Jarry. But the most important is that it had an appeal for the 20^th century so success in collaboration is; first, I would say artistic success, second, organizational success. And then obviously another indicator of success is how does it do, how does it hold up in relationship to its context, and in relationship to time.

When I first listened to Professor Ganahl speak about how the most thought out projects can easily be rejected to its lack of appeal. There was a part of me that was surprised to hear that. I typically associate a well-managed project with success, but then I realized that Professor Ganahl’s observation applied to a variety of fields.

Let consider big tech companies: Tesla, Apple, Uber, Amazon. Those are all companies that have become well organized and well-developed. But, they all have a great appeal. Especially considering the ideas behind how they started. Many startups in Silicon Valley, not matter how well financed or well organized they are, may never make it. For every success story we hear there are probably 10 times as many stories about failure, and it just might be because ideas that have such mass-appeal are hard to come by, like the Da Vicni’s Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s The starry Night.

Between Alfred Jarry’s Ubu King and Steve Jobs Macintosh computer, there are many parallels between the reasons their success. The artistic appeal and then the organizational success. For now, only time will tell to see the legacy of their success.