At our Reimagining the Role of Artistic Creativity in Business event at Aalto University on September 11th 2025, Dr. Thomas Girst, Global Head of Cultural Engagement at BMW, gave a keynote that resonated far beyond the lecture hall. This reflection captures the essence of his talk: an exploration of why art matters for business – not as decoration or transaction, but as dialogue that creates meaning, resilience, and beauty.
There are moments when the world feels ruled by acceleration – more data, more pressure, more noise – and yet, as Dr. Thomas Girst reminds us, what truly moves people rarely arrives on the shortest path between A and B. It comes through detours, encounters, and conversations that linger. We are not passengers drifting through space; we are crew. Our task is to create beauty – not prettiness, but meaning. Girst even writes “beauty” small, to protect it from inflation and slogans. Beauty, for him, can provoke, disturb, and awaken.
The way there is rarely linear. Steve Jobs stumbling into calligraphy; Erwin Panofsky’s line that the candle is lit where we had no business seeking – these show that imagination often blooms where efficiency would cut. The human brain runs on twenty watts, yet penicillin, pacemakers, and microwaves emerged from chance and curiosity. Machines may run on megawatts; a person can still be changed by a moment. Against the quarterly cycle, Girst places the long time of tortoises, sharks, and ancient plants. And he tells of Ferdinand Cheval, a French postman who, stone by stone over 33 years, built a palace in his garden. If one man can raise a world from pebbles, what might companies and communities do together?
This is where art and business should meet: not in transaction but in conversation. At BMW, artists are chosen by independent juries, partnerships last for decades, and authenticity is something earned, never claimed. The BMW Art Cars, born at Le Mans, carry this spirit – Warhol painting in 28 minutes, Cao Fei bringing AR, Olafur Eliasson freezing a hydrogen car into a parable on warming worlds. Julie Mehretu’s race car led to the African Film and Media Arts Collective, proving that what begins as a design can grow into a network. Opera for All brings orchestras into city squares, reminding us that culture is a commons.
Why is this strategic? Because a brand is a piece of real estate in someone else’s mind. Beyond garages and machines, there can also be museums and late-night arguments about meaning. Artists bring dissonance and care; they reopen the question of ends, not just means. They create space for the ”Homo ludens” in each of us – the playful human who discovers what the brief never asked.
Budgets tighten, leaders change, but continuity matters. Creativity depends on freedom: once autonomy is lost, only messaging remains. Girst ends with humor: the arts budget is always first to be cut, yet it is “the one thing that separates us from the monkeys.”
The truth is simple: without art, organizations shrink into efficiency and forget to look long. With art, they remember. Remember the postman, remember the palace, remember that the strongest brands are hosts – builders of encounters that leave us with more questions than we came with.
That is not indulgence. It is leadership.
