Christo and Jeanne‐Claude: The Negotiation of Art and Vice Versa

Over the past two decades the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (PON) has named thirteen people as Great Negotiators. The project, directed by my colleague Jim Sebenius, has given us the opportunity to commend our honorees’ outstanding work and to learn from their experience. The event is not a mere ceremony. It involves a full day of public presentations and small seminars, all supported by months of prior research and planning. This process has generated powerful cases and videos that negotiation teachers everywhere can share with their students. Almost all the recipients have been diplomats, representing five different continents. Two of them are Nobel Peace Prize laureates.
For our Great Negotiator program in 2008 our colleague Bob Mnookin had the inspired idea of selecting two people cut from very different cloth, the celebrated artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. By that time the couple was famous around the world. They had built Running Fence in 1975, a fabric structure 20 feet high and 24.5 miles long stretching through the hills of Northern California down to the ocean. In 1985 they draped shimmering golden fabric on Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris. In 1991, they erected long rows of huge umbrellas on both sides of the Pacific—1,340 blue ones in Japan, 1,760 yellow ones in the United States. Then, in 2005 they installed 7,503 fabric “gates” in New York’s Central Park. Christo and Jeanne-Claude also did massive installations in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Australia (Tomkins 2004).
At our 2008 Great Negotiator program we applauded Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s artistic brilliance, of course, but bestowed the award in recognition of how they brought their bold and controversial ideas to life.
They negotiated in three tightly linked domains. First, they dealt creatively with a network of banks, lawyers, engineers, filmmakers, and museums to secure resources needed to build and promote their work.
Second, starting from scratch, they established their own market for Christo’s drawings and collages. The proceeds funded the construction of their massive installations. They didn’t use a gallery to handle their work, rather they sold it themselves. They knew how to haggle and were shrewd about what pieces to market, what to keep in reserve, and (sometimes) what to buy back. They used lines of credit to get through times when the prices for art dropped.
Harvard Business School Professors Felda Hardymon and Josh Lerner have written that “Christo and Jeanne-Claude had a history of creating collectors. People tended to be attracted to the art for a number of reasons, and the artists made it comfortable for new collectors to purchase their works. Another reason for the attraction was the artists’ complete commitment to and passion for their projects” (Hardymon, Lerner, and Leamon 2006). The late artist Saul Steinberg said of his friend, Christo: “He not only invented himself, he invented his art, and even more amazing, he invented his public” (Grimes 2020).
Third, and our focus here, Christo and Jeanne-Claude negotiated tirelessly with regulatory boards and other stakeholders to win approval for their massive projects. The process was always contentious, often dragging on for years. In spite of all that, they expressed bafflement over why PON selected them. “We don’t negotiate,” Jeanne Claude asserted.