Mba Fabrications Inc. was founded in January 2010 by Canadian businessman Donald Ian McCaw. The year before his curiosity had been piqued when he read that the painting ‘Death Shmeth!’, created in 2006 by British artist Damien Hirst, had sold at auction for $1.6 million. With no background in art, but a good head for business, he reasoned that the materials and labour required to create the work could not have cost more than $1,000. Even allowing for facility, marketing and other expenses it was clear that the margin opportunity was astronomical. While he was aware that the creator of any work of art saw only a fraction of the money from its ultimate sale he sensed that a canny operator might be able to expand his share of the final proceeds. “In business all you need to know is the minimum production cost and the maximum sale price of any good”, says McCaw. “Everything in the middle is friction and the job of a well-designed business model is to eliminate the friction.”

His subsequent investigations convinced him that an opportunity of unprecedented scale existed in the fine art production industry. Here was a high-profile business that had nevertheless completely missed out on the transformative innovations of modern management science. Indeed, the workshop model of artistic production appeared to have changed little since the renaissance.

Consulting with academics as well as fellow executives McCaw identified three basic tools which had the potential to completely revolutionize the production of fine art.

1. Branding
Virtually all successful contemporary fine art is produced under the name of an artist. That individual either performs all of the work his or herself or is positioned as the indispensible ‘guiding light’ of the enterprise. Some artists have gone as far as to create collective identities that hint at corporate organization but these are invariably transparent pseudonyms with old-fashioned ‘creative geniuses’ positioned prominently behind them.  While the artist’s name is considered by many to be a brand, in reality it shares none of the key attributes of a sophisticated commercial identity which should beimpersonal, adaptable and transferrable. The “Mba” brand was designed as a locus for a cluster of associations and aspirations proven to impact positively on the art buying and influencing public.

2. Research
Central to the debilitating mythology that impotentiates contemporary fine art production is the concept of inspiration. McCaw realized early on that no sustainable commercial endeavour could be built on such a fickle foundation. In fact, this scattershot approach accounts for the overwhelmingly large proportion of wasted effort that overshadows total artistic output. Market research has been used to measure public taste in almost every area of business for close to a hundred years. Testing responses to variables such as subject, colour, scale and composition would seem to be an obvious approach in an industry that is purely visual. McCaw recognized that the inefficiencies taken for granted in the fine art production industry could be largely eliminated with a relatively minor up-front investment in market consultation.

3. Scalability
Organized around individual animating personalities, contemporary fine art production has proven itself incapable of realizing operational growth. To put it simply, artists are severely restricted in terms of how much product they can generate. Some have attempted to overcome this limitation by assembling large studio teams, usually made up of artists highly skilled in their own right. In the end, though, this is a costly approach. Furthermore, the constant oversight of the ‘master’ is a bottleneck to generating strong production efficiencies. McCaw set out to prove that fine art could be created using unskilled labourers working within a tightly controlled production environment. Every step from composition to completion is designed to be executed by employees with no formal training. In a sense the Mba Fabrications business model is Donald Ian McCaw’s true creative achievement.

I saw your paintings on-line and I have to say – they’re very nice!
Thank you. That’s very kind of you to say. Thank you.

They’re different, eh?
Different from what?

I don’t know…what do you call that – modern art, I guess?
I suppose you could call it that, sure.

Well, I really like modern art and I really like your art. You’re very talented.
Oh no, it’s not me. I don’t paint them. We have a production centre right here in Brampton where our employees do the actual painting.

Really?
Yes. It’s my company, and I’m ultimately responsible for everything we produce, but…you know, just like the president of Chrysler doesn’t actually build the cars here in Brampton, I don’t actually paint the paintings.

That’s weird!
Not to me it isn’t, but…I suppose it’s just a different way of getting to the end result. Perhaps different than you’re used to.

So I guess you have some talented people working for you.
I sure hope not! Talented people are high maintenance. They cost a lot to keep around and they’re hard to replace when they leave. If you want a highly responsive, scalable business you build it on unskilled labour. You want ‘plug and play’ inputs at every stage in the value chain and people are no different.

‘Plug and play’?
You know – one piece breaks down and you just swap in an identical replacement with minimal disruption. People should be no different. At Mba Fabrications that means every task in the production process is designed to be executable by at least 90% of the population with no prior training.

When I was young I worked for a company whose slogan was “achieving extraordinary results with ordinary people” or something like that. I remember that someone scrawled under the sign in the break room “making lots of money with shitty employees”. I was inspired by that idea. I know you probably can’t use that in your article (laughs) but it kind of gets at where I’m coming from.

So, let me see…why locate your studio in Brampton?
I chose the Brampton location because it was close to my home, which is ironic because I actually spend very little time there. I’m mainly travelling and networking. And by the way – I don’t like the word studio. It has bad connotations for me. We may be making art at the Brampton Production Site but you won’t find any artists on the premises.

Would you describe Brampton as a sophisticated, cosmopolitan business environment?
We have a population of half a million but we don’t have a McCafe yet, so I’d say ‘sophisticated’ might be a stretch at this point. But cosmopolitan – yeah, depending on how you define it, sure.

This past week I saw what has to be the worst exhibition of the season in Toronto, perhaps the worst I’ve ever seen anywhere. As my regular readers know I am loath to “go negative” on any artist bold enough to put themselves out there. However, the bizarre combination of incompetence and arrogance on display in the Mba Fabrications show at Meta Gallery left me confused and, dare I say it, angry.

The show looked pleasant enough as I entered the gallery. However, on close inspection the brightly coloured paintings revealed finishes that can only be described as disinterested. Sloppy edges and comatose fields of poorly applied pigment blocked my every effort to engage with the work.

Now, I’m not talking here about the ambitious kind of “bad painting” that scandalised New York at the eponymous New Museum show in 1978. Nor am I talking about the sophisticated critique of good taste implicit in the work of artists as diverse as Richard Tuttle, Phillip Guston and Jean Dubuffet. No, what I’m talking about is callous disregard for the craft of painting.

The source of the problem is there for all to see in the written material that accompanies the exhibition. Mba Fabrications, so it seems, is not an artist in any traditional sense, but a company looking to cash in on the lucrative fine art market. Started by businessman Donald Ian McCaw in 2010, the company uses market research to design its paintings and unskilled labourers to perform the work. The results are just about as terrible as you’d expect.

Don’t go.

Welcome to Mba Fabrications Inc. We are delighted that you have decided to join our team. As a new employee you will have the opportunity to work in an exciting, creatively-focused environment. Our unique approach allows each team member to participate in every step of the fine art production process. All functions have been designed to be performed by individuals with no previous experience or special abilities.

Concept – All Mba Fabrications paintings begin life as employee suggestions. Working within the company’s composition guidelines any team member with an idea for a painting is encouraged to fill out a ‘Scenario Proposal’ and place it in the mailbox outside of the Production Coordinator’s office. Submissions are reviewed regularly to identify those which demonstrate exceptional merit.

Photography – Once a Scenario Proposal has been approved for pre-production it is scheduled for image capture. Team members perform all functions from modelling to props and costumes to camera operation in our professionally-equipped, on-site photo studio. Multiple studies are produced to ensure that the best possible image is used for the remainder of the production process.

Drawing – Photographs that have been approved by the Design Committee are forwarded to the drawing centre where multiple tracings are made, often by several different employees. The goal is ultimately to create a line drawing that presents the image in a clearly ‘readable’ manner.

Scanning – Successful tracings are scanned into a computer graphics program and converted to vector image files. This process smoothes out many of the rough edges of the tracing and adds a modern stylized look to the image.

Composition – The scanned image is manipulated within the computer graphics program to create a fully realized scenario that combines a foreground figure with a simple background pattern. The completed scenario is outputted to a vendor’s long-plot vinyl cutter to create an adhesive stencil.

Background Application – Each Mba Fabrications painting is created by applying an adhesive vinyl stencil to a specially prepared wooden panel. The panel is coated with three layers of fluid acrylic paint that are applied in a gravity-based process that creates a smooth, glossy surface without brushwork. This approach ensures that the foreground stencil adheres evenly to the surface.

Foreground Application – Once the adhesive stencil has been applied to the poured background each cut segment is removed, painted and reapplied. No artistic skill is required at this stage (or at any other stage) as all borders are carefully described by the stencil edges. All colour decisions are made by the Operations Manager as selected from the approved palette.

You won’t find Damon L. Cain’s name on the ‘contact’ page at the Mba Fabrications website, yet his fingerprints are all over the company. An old business school friend of founder and President Donald Ian McCaw, Cain was involved from the very beginning in almost every aspect of the Mba Fabrications story. I had a chance to sit down with him recently to discuss his recollections of the company’s early days.

I decided to begin at the beginning by asking how the company came to be in the first place.

“There is no beginning to the whole Mba Fabrications undertaking. Even in my own mind I can’t pinpoint a specific moment where I can say, yes, that’s where it all started. It seemed to just evolve from conversations I had been having with Don since time immemorial. He is always spinning out new business concepts, most of which have no hope of viability. I suppose Mba Fabrications was just another one of those flaky ideas, perhaps as far back as 2007.”

Cain adds, however, that he does recall a point when he realized that the notion of entering the fine art business wasn’t going away. While other ideas (like a series of celebrity headline websites) came and went, McCaw seemed obsessed by the prices that relatively modern paintings were commanding at auction. Cain, who had an undergraduate degree in Art History from McGill in addition to his Univeristy of Toronto MBA, started to pay attention.

“In the course of our conversations I became aware that Don had actually been obsessed with art in his high school days until he got turned down by the Ontario College of Art, as it was called then. You have to understand what a shock that was – he had always struck me as the least likely of all my acquaintances to have an interest in creative things. He is basically all about business, “24/7” as they say. So he had some familiarity with the field, although I’d say his was an immature kind of familiarity, frozen in adolescence so to speak.”

Once the two friends decided that art making was an opportunity worth exploring they began to subject it to the full brunt of their business school training. Models like Michael Porter’s Five Forces and Edmund Learned’s SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) Analysis were brought to bear on the idea of creating a fine art production business from scratch. Cain remembers well the growing astonishment both men felt as they realized that here was a business that had never been attacked in an even remotely sophisticated manner.

“I think that’s what Don sensed from the beginning, even though he maybe couldn’t have expressed it that way at the time. Every entrepreneur dreams of happening upon a true greenfield opportunity, the shallow stream whose bed glistens with visible gold. I know it sounds crazy but that’s really how we felt. We couldn’t believe it. The more we looked the more obvious it seemed. The margin opportunity was astronomical. We kept waiting for the bad news, for the downside, and it just never came.”

With his academic background Cain was aware of the irony that he was excited about an artistic project where the art itself would be something of an afterthought. It was soon decided that two dimensional work would be the easiest to create…and it didn’t hurt that paintings invariably garnered the highest prices on the market relative to other mediums like sculpture and photography. When the subject of subject matter came up it was McCaw who made the obvious suggestion: the new venture would make use of a Toronto-based focus group testing business, M+A Ideascape.

“A friend of mine, Dan Molina, ran a little market research consultancy with my his wife at the time, Candi Aldon. They were using biometrics to gauge responses to various products and political concepts. It was a sideline for him, but something that Candi enjoyed doing. She had worked for years as a registered nurse so it was basically as simple as tracking changes in vital signs while exposing subjects to carefully synchronized product presentations. When you aggregate the data you see consumer sentiment patterns you don’t get from merely asking people their opinions. The whole approach is based on the theory that purchase decisions are made at a deeply biological level”.

For Mba Fabrications Cain created brief slide-shows detailing the lives and works of 100 prominent artists from the last 50 years. After plotting subject responses along a timeline a definite arc of preferences revealed itself. Although Cain won’t divulge the details of what he calls ‘the secret recipe’, he freely admits that the familiar look of the company’s paintings combines elements from the work of Patrick Caulfield, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Tom Wesselmann and Iain Baxter&.

“I remember Don telling me ‘But Damon – I’ve never even heard of any of these people!’”

“In the earliest days it was assumed by Don (Mba Fabrications Inc. founder and President Donald Ian McCaw) that he would need to hire artists to make the paintings. That proved problematic for a number of reasons, mainly because Don couldn’t get along with any of the artists he interviewed. They actually made him angry as people.”

Eventually Cain suggested that they explore the possibility of using unskilled labourers to execute the paintings.

“I was aware of the phenomenon of de-skilling, of artists trying to disguise their talents, because the ability to draw or paint had basically become an embarrassment in the art world. So I thought, why not just hire incompetents from the get-go? Sorry, I know that’s not fair to our great employees, but I think you know what I’m getting at. The research had told us what the paintings should look like so we just reverse engineered every step until there were no remaining processes requiring freehand drawing or painting. The end result is work that is basically put together through a combination of tracing, computer rendering, paint pouring and stencilling. My biggest concern now is that the employees, through the natural course of day-to-day practice, will actually become too good at what they are doing.”

This approach had important implications for the appearance of the paintings. For instance, while it was relatively easy for ordinary employees to produce an acceptable tracing of a figure from a photograph, it proved to be almost impossible for them to produce an acceptable tracing of a face. Once, after accidentally cutting off the head of the model in a reference photo, it was decided that there would be no heads or faces in any of the images produced by the company.

I asked Cain if he felt they had hit upon something truly exceptional with the distinctive look of the company’s paintings.

“I think that’s a very interesting question that lies at the heart of all of art history. Earlier this year I visited the Rubell (Family Collection) in Miami. I entered a room there and saw a white canvas with a black-and-white photograph screen-printed on it and a few words painted beneath in a simple font. I got that immediate, involuntary thrill from seeing a real John Baldessari – and I don’t even particularly like John Baldessari. Now, there are only two ways to account for that kind of impact: either a. John Baldessari saw something of aesthetic value in those mundane California scenes, and that spare presentation, decades before the rest of us, or b. it was enough to create an imagery that was merely unique to which he could apply the full force of his six-foot-seveness, his long-white-beardedness, etc. At Mba Fabrications we strive to be merely unique. For us, the right answer is b.”

So why men in suits?

“Well, originally I was taking pictures of Don when we were testing the concept. One of those shots became the TIME series of paintings. That is Don looking at his watch in that painting, most people don’t know that, but he turned out to be a terrible model. Still, our research showed that people have a strong gut reaction to a man in a suit, you know, the image of the modern executive, the heroic CEO, so that was something we wanted to work with. Now, of course, we have employees do all the modelling, and there is a lot less yelling.”

In closing I asked Cain how he would describe his role at Mba Fabrications Inc.

“I suppose I would describe my role in the whole project as that of an advisor. I am a paid consultant but not an employee. For tax reasons I am not an owner but I do hold a large block of deep-in-the-money warrants.”