The cliché ‘we can learn from history’ is in many cases nonsense – we continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. We do however have to ride that fast learning curve to create new product and have new ideas. Business is not a static immovable object it has to evolve. We have to morph into different markets, pushing our ideas onto the next phase – this is what artists do. Boundaries have to be broken and new frontiers challenged or we simply have to do it better than our rivals.

There were many artists trying to claim freedom from nature, to allow themselves the pleasures of more self expression but they were held back by the simple fact that man himself was tied down with his links to nature. We have now become at home with the Internet and its optimized retail opportunities. The steps the artists of the 1880’s were looking for was a break from observed representation. Symbolism and its search for new boundaries of creativity within literature and poetry began to point the way for these young men, their almost post modernist approach to their art looked to steal ideas from every form of intellectual discipline. Web designers and SEO gurus are doing the same now; they are copying code, search words, keywords and optimization tricks from each other. These painters, over a hundred years ago, were a clique and were accused by their contemporaries of being too intellectual to be serious painters. Search Engine Optimization is also a mysterious clique with its differing ethics. Now is the time to break through this structured discipline and re-invent Search Engine Optimization and get our businesses moving forward.