Hans Ulrich Obrist: What business can learn from the art world

What It Covers

Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of London's Serpentine Galleries and curator of over 40 years of studio visits, shares frameworks for creative leadership with Nicolai Tangen — covering serendipity, long-duration thinking, multisensory experience design, and what business can learn from curatorial practice.

Key Questions Answered

• •Listening as a creative foundation: Before designing any experience or project, start with deep listening rather than imposing a framework. Obrist has conducted studio visits daily since age 16 — roughly 14,600 visits over 40 years — treating each conversation as a discovery process to uncover what artists want to create but haven't yet been enabled to do.
• •Serendipity as a structured practice: Resist the urge to lock in a master plan early. Obrist's handwriting project — now his entire Instagram mission — emerged from two separate unplanned conversations with Umberto Eco and poet Etel Adnan. Keeping projects open to chain reactions allows unexpected directions to surface that a fixed checklist would eliminate.
• •Multisensory design drives return visits: Exhibitions engaging multiple senses generate significantly longer dwell time and repeat attendance. Peter Doig's Serpentine show, which combined painting with a live listening space and weekly music sessions, brought visitors back daily and weekly — contrasting with the typical few-second engagement in front of a single artwork.
• •Cross-industry alliances expand reach exponentially: Partnering outside traditional institutional networks produces scale unavailable through conventional channels. Serpentine's collaboration with Fortnite placed the gallery on the game's landing page, generating 150 million virtual visitors in two weeks — more than any physical exhibition — and drove new, younger audiences into the physical gallery space.
• •Unrealized projects reveal hidden ambition: Regularly asking colleagues, artists, or yourself what projects remain undone — due to scale, time, self-censorship, or institutional constraints — surfaces the most generative ideas. Obrist treats this question as a diagnostic tool across 4,500 hours of recorded interviews, identifying patterns between what practitioners dream of and what structures currently prevent.