Is technology innovating art or is it the other way around?

Creativity: One more natural resource we’re destroying?

If you can read, you must read this by the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani. Is creative cannibalism really where we want to go? And if the answer actually is yes, how long before we eat ourselves into an extinction of imagination?

What do you need to be creative?

In his Geniocity.com blog, Arts-Entrepreneur Resources,  Matt Charboneau takes a look this week at the steadily rising pool of resources for Northeast Ohio artists. The latest wave in that pool is something unique, but not just to the Cleveland area: The arts-project loan program launched last week by NoteWorthy Federal Credit Union may be the only one of its kind in the United States.

Matt and I are both volunteer directors on the board of NoteWorthy FCU, a nonprofit financial institution that began 50 years ago as the credit union for the Local 4 Musicians Union. It has since become independent and is in the process of broadening its mission, aiming to become the credit union for the whole arts community – local, regional and national.

NoteWorthy’s first step in that direction is the Creative Arts Project (CAP) Loan program, which offers loans of up t0 $50,000  to artists of all kinds who need capital for the tools and materials of their particular disciplines, from documentary filmmaking and ballet to death metal and graphic novels. NoteWorthy believes that many American artists need access to loans of this kind and encourages arts organizations around the U.S. to join the credit union (call 216-263-7034 to find out how), so making their employees, members, students and affilated artists eligible for NoteWorthy membership and special artist services.

The CAP loans are just NoteWorthy’s most recent service innovation for artists - the credit union plans to keep adding  new artist-oriented financial products and programs to the checking and savings accounts, credit cards and vehicle and musical-instrument loans that it already offers. All of us on the board hope that arts organizations including performing groups and companies, recording outfits, professional associations, support and advocacy institutions, schools, museums, galleries and more will find in NoteWorthy the helpful, artist-friendly and easy-to-use financial home base that they’ve always wanted. 

NoteWorthy’s getting creative so you can, too. Now: What do you need?

Creativity is political

Every once in a while, I hear this from an artist or scientist or tech whiz: ”I don’t pay any attention to politics. I just want to make my art/ do my experiments/ invent cool new stuff.”

(Actually, something similar emanates from about 92 percent of everybody in the U.S., who just want to watch their fake reality shows, pound beers and buy $300 athletic shoes that they wear to cruise the aisles at WalMart, but that’s another case of willful ignorance altogether.)

My eyes tend to get stuck in the upward-roll position when I hear the oh-politics  statement from anyone who’s trying to produce something new. I guess it seems preposterous to me that a person clever enough to compose opera,  genetically modify food crops or devise digital dancing hamsters could be that clueless but, apparently, creative ability doesn’t always make humans self-aware.  

The fact is, every single creative act is political, because creativity is about changing things. Anytime you mess with what people are used to, you affect how they feel, think, act – toward you and your work, toward life and the world.  And what is politics?  The art of manipulating how people think and feel so they’ll act and react in particular ways.  

Notice how I said art.

But what I’m getting at is mathematical, too, in the rudimentary way that I am so much the master of. So here’s the super-associative property of human invention: creativity = relationships = politics. All you need for proof is to read Geniocity.com’s blog pages today and see how imaginative change creates customer satisfaction (Will Limkemann’s “The Constant Entrepreneur“), legal turmoil  (Peter Friedman’s “Ruling Imagination“), commercial warfare (Charlie Eby’s “Media Man“), and outright fiction in the struggle over the federal budget (Seth Rosenberg’s  ”Inexact Possibilities“).

Still don’t believe me? Make some creative change of your own today – anything, fix the coffee a new way – and watch how fast your inspiration gives a wedgie to someone else’s expectation.

Just try to handle it better than our elected representatives.

Geniocity.com’s education blog debuts

Today on our roster, you’ll find a new blog that’s about a subject at the very heart of creativity: education, which at its worst can crush and deaden the human impulse to invent and, at its best, can encourage and develop it. 

We think the blog No Mind Is an Island: Imagination, Innovation & Interconnectedness,  will help readers avoid the first and accomplish the second. In it, Tim Tibbitts will write about the creative frontiers of learning, and not just in the classroom.  As the head of a Cleveland-area tutoring service, The Whole Kid, Tim has an unusual and interesting perspective on the difficulties children can have in learning and on  the innovative means of engaging them that can make all the difference to their success as students and people.

I hope you’ll enjoy it and welcome Tim onto your list of must-read bloggers.