"Arbitrary decision making and personal inventiveness are discouraged."

The role of the assistant is to help the assisted realize his or her goals. In your own work, you can do whatever you want. Sachs is saying only that when you are working as his assistant, focus on implementing his ideas instead of yours.

Take the good parts, discard the bad. And there are definitely both in this video.

And even on this point, it's not all bad when you consider how design/architecture studios operate. I probably would've been better off as a junior dev if a bit more of my personal inventiveness (cough - ruby metaprogramming - cough) had been smacked down

jraines mostly got it. It's worth noting the look and feel of the Sachs studio. I doubt anyone is taking that advice completely seriously. But if, instead, you just said 'have fun, do whatever!' things would probably be a huge mess.

No, Tom Sachs is super serious about that and it's strictly enforced in his studio.

Source: friend worked in his studio.

That's so interesting! And strange!

There's a balance to strike between "wanting everyone working under you to implement exactly your vision", "wanting everyone working under you to make something more amazing by throwing their own ideas in".

An important part of finding this balance is deciding exactly how much you trust your underlings to know enough about what the hell they're doing so that they don't do anything dumb, and to have a vision closely enough aligned with yours that their attempts at improving your ideas usually make you delighted. Clearly Sachs is not willing to extend much trust to people he is just now hiring to work in his studio.

Like, would you be happy with an intern fresh out of school who decided to roll their own crypto instead of interfacing to the library you told them to?

Sachs also got burnt by "outsourcing" on his 1998 "SONY Outsider" installation, which neither he nor art critics were happy with after it was completed.

Bear in mind that an artist's USP is their personal charisma and creativity. The assistant's job is to elaborate based on an initial invention by the artist. None of the assistant's personality/aura/talent should manifest in work that gets signed by the artist.

It's not a good situation but it's standard among big nane artists (Koons is notorious for strictness, afaicr)