It’s the first weekly Creativity Talent Show!

On Fridays from now on, I’ll be helping you get started on your weekend by featuring a selection of the most creative original works I can find, from everywhere there is to look.  You can help back by sending in to carolyn@geniocity.com what you think is the most imaginative work you’ve seen, whether your own or someone else’s – video or audio clips of original performances, films and music; pieces of writing; stills or slide shows of art and design. I’ll choose what I think is the best each week to feature in this spot.

Here’s the maiden – so to speak – lineup:

Water and Light – Ghostly Face, by darrellh2000

Poetry: Zora Howard performing “Bi-Racial Hair“

Creativity enthusiasts: Birds of a feather?

Creativity has an image problem: So many people who promote it appear to be wackos.

I hope I’m not writing an autobiography here.

Whether I personally fit the description or not, I’ve discovered in the course of normal journalistic research about creativity and the brain science behind it that the subject tends to attract two kinds of people. On one side – in orderly lines – I find sober scientists and policy people for whom creativity is a skill to be deconstructed and analyzed, or a tool/asset to be fostered for its beneficial effects on education, economic activity and emotional health.  On the other side drifts and flits an aviary of colorful mystics and visionaries for whom creativity is the warm updraft beneath their ecstatic wings. To them, it’s the stuff of elaborate belief and thought systems that they want to use, either to set themselves free (probably in the desert with a supply of fingerpaints that they can smear on nearby geographic features while rapturously trance-dancing to old John Tesh tapes), or to recruit armies of followers for their motivational 12-step programs that offer the keys to self-actualization and financial success (only $79.95 for the book and 10-DVD home-instruction course, free T-shirt included!).

Then there’s Allan Snyder.

Snyder heads the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney in Australia. A graduate of  Harvard, MIT and the College of London, he’s also been a Guggenheim Fellow at Yale University’s School of Medicine and a Royal Society Research Fellow at Cambridge University’s Physiology Labratories. He’s hilariously laureled: winner of the 1997 Australia Prize and the 2001 Marconi International Prize for communication and information technology, a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and recipient of its Clifford Patterson Prize for contributions that benefit mankind, a scientific pioneer whose groundbreaking discoveries involve a range of fields – visual neurobiology and optical physics, communications and mind sciences – usually addressed by whole colleges of scholars. In recent years, creativity has become his particular specialty.

He’s evidently a highly respected scientist. And brilliant. But his real genius seems to be for self-promotion.

Take a look at his site. It’s crammed – even  in the video – with color pictures of all the magazines and and news shows that have covered him, pictures of himself with Sir Richard Branson, Nelson Mandela, Baz Luhrmann, Tony Blair, the founders of Google, the Dalai Lama. There’s a celebrity picture gallery, a long list of books and articles with more celebrity pictures. The video says it’s about what the Centre for the Mind does, but it’s also just a series of promotional images of Snyder. In nearly every one of them, he wears what is clearly his current trademark, a fisherman’s cap. It looks consciously eccentric.

 Snyder, right, with Tony Blair

More than a decade ago, Snyder’s studies of the effect of light on the retina, and how the brain processes the incoming images and information, got him interested in autism. Autistic people don’t process information in the same way the rest of us do; in some ways, their brains seem less functional than normal people’s, but certain rare autistic people can exhibit extraordinary, superhuman mental skills of a very specific kind. Called savants, they are the kinds of mathematical and artistic geniuses about whom movies such as “Rain Man” are made. 

What Snyder started wondering, based on both natural and injury-induced brain function, was whether these fantastic creative and mathematical skills were latent in all of us, but appeared only in a very few people because the parts of their brains that would normally block the skills weren’t working.

So Snyder tested his idea by … applying magnets to the left sides of people’s brains to see if they would temporarily become savants.

“Snyder’s ideas sound very New Age. That is why people are skeptical,” said eminent neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, head of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California-San Diego, in the February 2002 issue of Discovery. “I have a more open mind than most of my colleagues simply because I have seen [sudden-onset savant cases] happen.”        

Snyder wanted to see if the magnets would temporarily deactivate a particular brain area and so allow people to more accurately guess the number of objects in a large group.

Apparently, it worked. Since then, Snyder has been making a career out of  the idea that more of us could become what he calls creative “champions” by tapping our inner savants. He’s written a book called ”What Makes a Champion!” about the success secrets of highly accomplished people, held huge celebrity-laden “champion” events – billed as the Olympic Mind Games – before the 2000 and 2008 Olympics in Sydney and Beijing,  and become a fixture on the celebrity circuit, a one-odd-man media phenomenon touting a discovery that sounds about as believable as cold fusion. Or Uri Geller’s bent spoons.

Now, is this good or bad for creativity?

Creativity needs real champions. But while Snyder’s professional credentials ought to silence all cynics, his magical magnets and apparent self-obsession practically hand those cynics lie detectors and public-address systems.

I guess if his discovery ends up making us all geniuses, no one will care how flamboyantly shallow Snyder’s public persona seems. In the meantime, he seems to be enjoying the aviary.

President plugs creativity

From Barack Obama’s address to Congress last night:

“The answers to our problems don’t lie beyond our reach. They exist in our laboratories and our universities, in our fields and our factories, in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth.”

And in our studios and rehearsal halls.

Divided we go bankrupt

The United States is big on individualism. In this country, we’re all raised with the idea that going our own way is our birthright, our mission – part of the iconic American dream in which we each create our own destiny, follow our own conscience and answer to no man. Or woman, especially the little kind. 

Hollywood movies have burned this into our brains as if our memories were DVDs: We aren’t supposed to follow. We’re all supposed to go out there, stake our own claim and start our own business, community, political movement, religion, band, micro-brewery, website.

Of course, you could well argue that all of us obeying this imperative is following, and major following of a particularly clueless, cowlike nature, too. But for the sake of a larger point, let’s say that we really are a nation of  god-damned independents.

So what happens when that irresistible, entrepreneurial spirit runs up against an immovable financial crisis like the one we’re in? The first thing to give out (besides our income …) has to be our vaunted go-it-aloneness.

That’s a hard fact the nonprofit world has been learning in recent years as subscriptions have fallen, along with corporate and private support. There just aren’t enough resources anymore to sustain the old way of operating solo, so nonprofits have started – suspiciously at first, but with increasing urgency – working together and sharing expenses.

The rest of us are going to have to do the same.

It’s not going to be enough just to pull together in spirit – though that would be helpful, too, and Barack Obama is good at engendering sentiments of unity, as he did again last night in his first official address to Congress. We Americans, who fancy ourselves as uncompromising hero-leaders along the lines of John Wayne and Iron Man Tony Stark, have got to start teaming up our efforts on all levels.

Look how much duplication exists in the marketplace and in government and in private life. The nearly obscene range of goods in our supermarkets ( 75 kinds of cereal?) makes immigrants from less indulgent lands cry. Our towns and cities pay enormous costs for separate services, from water and sewer to schools and security. About every third person – including me – wants to build his or her own little business empire or good-doing foundation.

How many individual film-production companies and clothing lines do we have in this country? How many people  separately collecting shoes for needy kids or money to cure particular diseases? How many software developers and yard-care companies and pizza parlors?

Doesn’t it seem like we could streamline some of  this bloat by joining forces with each other? Some efforts at efficiency have already begun – fusion marketing, (half-hearted) regionalism, shared office-supply purchasing - but we’re going have to get a lot more serious about it if we want to improve productivity, trim government waste, reduce our national debt and increase the success rate of small businesses.

I’m not talking about us surrendering our identities and becoming part of some unspeakably huge conglomerate. Just sharing and collaborating where that makes sense and strengthens us individually and collectively.  I don’t think we can afford not to anymore.

I mean, even John Wayne collaborated with other cowpokes once in a while – especially in a tight spot.

Their city was gone … creative. Yours, too?

Tourisme Montreal / Stephan Poulin 

Creativity has the power to change the whole world. But first, apparently, it’s going to change the way city leaders brand their burgs.

In Montreal – where they clearly can sense the power of  “Creative Class” economic-development guru Richard Florida  even a whole Canadian province away from his new base at the University of Toronto – someone has assayed a claim on the designation “city of creativity.”

(This is a bold gambit and seems rather creative in and of itself, if for no other reason than that none of the several cities Florida has adopted and quitted in rapid succession had the smarts to position itself as the “city of creativity” before he moved on. Perhaps Montreal hopes to woo him next, to keep him in Canada so thousands of Great White Northerners who stay in Florida every year can finally enjoy having a Florida stay with them.)

Montreal might deserve such a title. A city of  historic interest and visual appeal, it can claim a wide array of cultural activities, including major fim and music festivals, the widely known Just for Laughs comedy festival, the home base of Cirque de Soleil, four universities, a lot of research and development, an indelible French heritage and the food to go with it. It’s also gay-friendly, one of Florida’s key standards of creativity measurement.

But many cities could say the same - just not in French or even with a good fake accent. 

What’s interesting about all this is not which metropolitan area can feel the most justified in calling itself creative, but that so many suddenly want to. Florida can certainly take credit for having turned local governments on to the economic benefits of attracting creative people with amenities and activities that keep them stimulated, happy and working hard in desirable and inventive new industries.

More important, though, awareness of creativity and its benefits has at last started to permeate the flinty shell of North Americans’ traditional value system, the segregated one that thought the only valuable kind of inventiveness was scientific, technological, artisanal, commercial, male and straight and that any other kind of imaginative pursuit – especially the arts – was frouffy claptrap or treacherous sensory seduction and thus the work of the devil and/or women.

We are recovering Puritans. And as we get better, so will our economy and society.  Maybe soon, Montreal will have to duke it out with every other municipality on the continent for the name City of Creativity.

The measure of creativity

It’s very, very early Monday morning and I just finished watching the Oscars, which were, for once, high on humor and talent and low on embarrassment. Equally rare, pretty much all the nominees were deserving, so even when some of those I thought should win didn’t, the bitter sense that good work had been robbed and lame work rewarded was enjoyably missing.  

But entertaining though it was, the show got me thinking – as it often does – about how creativity is judged. Most of us realize that neither performances nor any other kinds of creative works can fairly be compared to each other because each is unique in approach,context, goals and means. To pick a “best” actor or newspaper story or scientific breakthrough, though fun, is silly, really, and has the quite destructive effect of making losers of a lot of excellent people and their accomplishments. 

This isn’t the lesson people need to learn about creativity. What individuals and whole societies need to realize is that any creative thought or act has value in terms of adding ingredients to the pot of human ideas and stirring it – and while not all the results of creativity are positive ones, all of them add flavor to the soup of human experience and knowledge.  

So how do we go about setting U.S. educational standards for instruction in creativity? (The United Kingdom has some ideas.) We’re going to have to adopt standards if creativity is to become an integrated part of core curricula in our schools – as it should, because artistic, scientific and mathematical invention and creative interpretation in all fields teach the imagination, critical thinking, problem-solving and self-expression that humans need to do any task well, especially the many we must attempt in order to make the world a safer and more enjoyable place. But to turn creativity into a competition will shut out and discourage many.

Including everyone is essential, no matter how different each person’s abilities and tastes. And perhaps measuring creative achievement should be no more complicated than this: that our schools’ and communities’ requirements will be met if a student has gotten an idea, worked hard to express and develop it, and ended up with results that demonstrate a process of thought and action.

We probably can’t, and wouldn’t want to, stop industry popularity contests such as the Academy Awards. But we can make sure that every child leaves school with creative skills that help him or her feel like a winner – and succeed like one.

End of the week

It’s Friday.  Have yourself a little holiday.

Prescription for Cleveland: public-art therapy

Something snapped yesterday. Maybe it’s because I seem to be getting a cold.

But as I was driving through the University Circle section of Cleveland, Ohio, on an afternoon of mud-brown earth, crumbling pavement and dark, pouring skies, I passed a newish art installation in the median – a couple of dull shapes made of ordinary stones – and suddenly, I had had it.

Simply … had it. Why does so much of the public art in this city look like part of the urban blight? Don’t we have enough heaps of rubble and rusting hulks already? Do poverty and decay and collective depression improve somehow because they’ve been referenced in a rockpile or a crude, steel sculpture that looks like an exploded muffler?

Cleveland’s public-art projects tend to solicit works that reflect, and comment on, our gritty life here in the Rust Belt. Maybe people think this gives the works more meaning and importance than brightly decorative pieces would have.

I don’t think it works that way. Frankly, I think most public art of any style tends to lack significant content, probably because no one wants to get into any more fights about using taxpayer dollars for pieces that might prove controversial.  But I also think the strain of trying to make a deep but publicly acceptable statement about industrialism and urban ills too often results in a simple, platitudinous literalism about ugliness. 

 We have enough ugliness here in Cleveland. It gets to all of us so much that our chronic outlook on life has become as gloomy as our winters. I would like artists to comment on this as much, and in as many ways, as they like in work that will be displayed in galleries and museums. But on the streets of Cleveland, we need color and beauty.

See, Clevelanders are sort of like alcoholics. We’re always sodden with defeat and self-loathing. Our putting up public art that’s all about our rotting infrastructure and bleak climate and faded glory days is like a drunk buying another bottle of whiskey. We need to get off the depressants.

We need color and beauty. Color and beauty aren’t shallow. They can express great things, even sorrowful or disturbing things. The difference between them and art that looks like factory waste is that color and beauty will make our city thrilling to be in. Our people will throng our sidewalks instead of hiding inside, because vivid reds and golds and azures make their hearts leap up. Gorgeous architecture and murals, brilliant sculpture and color-lighted streets will draw people from other places to see how beautiful and special Cleveland looks. They will want to be here, to stay here.   

Will they want to stay here if they see the art on the Detroit-Superior Bridge that took years and years to get and looks mostly like plain lampposts with a few hard-to-see twiddly things on top? Will a glimpse of the gray, patterned pavers and the cut-out steel trash bins on the new Euclid Corridor keep any of us locals from throwing ourselves under a bus on a sullen February day? 

Or how about those giant metal contraptions on East Superior Avenue that look like some salvage company dropped a load off the truck?

Will they save anybody’s sanity?

Exactly. So could we start changing our view by changing our look, please? Now?

 Euclid Corridor crosswalk art.                                                                              2007  N. Bryson

Update on arts and the national stimulus package

Americans for the Arts had this to say about the reinstating of $50 million for the National Endowment of the Arts in the federal stimulus package passed by the House of Representatives Friday and signed yesterday by President Obama (there’s a 2 p.m. EST webinar to sign up for, too):

Arts Recovery Funds Restored in Economic Stimulus Bill
February 13, 2009—Today the House of Representatives voted 246 to 183 to pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The bill includes $50 million in direct support for arts jobs through the National Endowment for the Arts and language that would have prevented museums, theaters, and arts centers from receiving stimulus funds was removed.

“It was not politics as usual in Washington, as the Congressional conferees’ final version of the bill seized the opportunity to provide much-needed stimulus support for the nation’s creative workforce. The National Endowment for the Arts will distribute $50 million of the stimulus funds to arts projects in all 50 states which specifically preserve jobs in the nonprofit arts sector that have been most hurt by the economic downturn.  Additionally, the final version of the stimulus bill further recognized the role the arts play in the overall U.S. economy by removing the Senate ban on state and local governments from using any of the recovery funds to benefit museums, theaters, and art centers,” said Robert L. Lynch, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts.

Americans for the Arts will hold a webinar on this topic on Wednesday, February 18 at 2 pm. Free for professional members, it will update arts organizations on the economic stimulus package and other federal sources of arts funding.

To register for today’s webinar, click here and scroll down to the end of the first news story, where you’ll see the registration link at the end of the webinar announcement.

Europe moves ahead, creatively

Europe understands creativity and innovation.

In the United States, economic stimulus money is apparently going to be handed out to lots of individual sectors without any grand plan in place to get all of our leaders brainstorming new ideas and working together across sectors, coordinating efforts and resources and maximizing the effects of innovation on the economy and society’s other problems.  The results may be a wasteful, duplicative mishmash of unconnected policies and programs.

But the European Union, where creativity is recognized as the key to the current financial crisis and to a better future in general, has declared 2009 the EU’s Year of Creativity and Innovation. Its leaders also expect to increase the percentage of the EU’s annual budget that goes to research, technology and innovation.

EU member states such as Portugal, Spain and Luxembourg have been holding conferences and forums to officially launch their own national versions of the Year of Creativity and Innovation, bringing together thinkers and leaders from universities and business, technology and arts and culture.

A major European conference on creativity and innovation will be held by the European Commission March 2-3 in Brussels to showcase best practices among projects that have been funded by EU programs. The idea is to examine creativity and innovation from different angles, using successful, EU-funded projects as examples and discussing how to ensure similar success for new creative endeavors.    

The EU’s current innovation-investment program, called the 7th EU Research and Technology Programme, dedicates $52 billion to creativity and innovation over the six-year period from 2007 to 2013, derived from the 3 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) that member nations are expected to give. For the next funding period, 2013-21, EU leaders anticipate that financial investment will grow. 

Imagine what the U.S. could do if all the states and sectors worked out a structure for collaborating on creative thinking, research and innovation – and not just for technology, either.

President Obama?