On Nov 14, 2009, at 12:28 PM, William Conger wrote:
There is, I think, personality, a particular range of inflections
of character and choice of valuing and action, but that is not
creativity. Creativity is public. It is sharable and it can be
fitted to large concepts and genres.
Okay, I'll pipe up.
I like this statement. I hadn't ever put it this way, but I believe it
gets at a crucial element that I had always intuited was missing from
a lot of the palaver about the artist's "creativity," as if it were a
private experience that was the mechanism to produce the things put in
the gallery. It reminds me of the difference between "spirituality"
and "religion." The first is the subjective feeling about forces
believed to permeate the universe, while the latter are the public
forms of shared, common experiences of a kind.
Religion and religious practices are shared in public, not just
exhibited to a passive audience. So too is art, although the
participation of the public might seem to be very passive and minimal.
Part of the active participation is that works are shown in public,
that is, they are *published*--made known to other.
Nothing we make is made in a vacuum or completely isolated from other
things. And just as the words we use carry with them not only the
denoted meanings and current connotations, they also convey the
buried, ancient memories of their etymological roots, which serve as a
tincture to our understanding. This is a public thing, using language.
In fact, all modes of communication are, by definition, public and
communal. Art is one of them, and the methods of art making, often
foggily called "creativity," are acts of imaginative invention.
Also, I believe the notion of "individual freedom" is an irrelevant
element, more political than intrinsic to artistic work. What is
needed--and what does, in fact, produce "freedom"--is discipline and
mastery of the material and metier. Not a stultified and dull
mechanical roteness. No, but rather the freedom that comes from the
confidence one has when one doesn't have to worry about how to do
something, but what to do. Such a freedom applies equally to the
intellectual and mental work of making art as it does to the material
and instrumental work.
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Michael Brady
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http://considerthepreposition.blogspot.com/
http://thinkinglikeadesigner.blogspot.com/
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