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.

Creative but chicken?

Interesting back-to-back editorial pieces in The Plain Dealer yesterday: Brent Larkin ’s story about the growing  panic among Cleveland City Council members over the fact that that their city is declining more and more rapidly, they know radical change is needed, but no one’s stepping up to make it happen;  and Harold L. Sirkin’s commentary (apparently as yet unavailable on Cleveland.com) about the political and bureaucratic cement shoes our nation has strapped to its efforts to get anything done. 

Both are about political will and courage. But what they really address is the fear of change.

 No matter how creative we are, we’ll never move forward unless we have the guts to act on our ideas.  What is everyone so afraid of? And why is this fear part of our biology?

Is innovation wiping out reading?

Fascinating story in Duke Magazine about the abrupt changes taking place in the culture of reading. I think it’s especially interesting that not until the very end of the discussion, and then only obliquely, did anyone touch on the idea of reading as an aesthetic experience involving the senses as well as the intellect.

Is reading only a process of absorbing written information or does the visual design of the book, the feel of natural materials such as leather and paper, the smell of ink, the gentle glow of light on pages (not from them) add up to something richer, more focused and more deeply informing  than characters on a screen?

Grassroots: The agent of green change

How do you systematically redesign a place that’s already filled up and covered over with stuff you may not want, but can’t easily get rid of? The answer is: Maybe you don’t. And that’s no fun to hear when all you really want to do is level the mess, haul the rubble away and start all over.

I talk not of teen bedrooms, but of whole cities and regions. It’s hard to drive through any older population center and not feel as if a good mass implosion were the only answer for all the crummy parts, followed by an invitation to some latter-day Baron Haussmann to come in and reshape the whole metropolis from the sewer pipes on up (ignoring the distasteful fact that you’d also need an Emperor Napoleon III to decree and pay for the whole project on the backs of the working poor).

But Terry Schwarz thinks that’s the wrong approach. The interim director of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative , who’s been working on Cleveland’s land-use and environmental problems with Neighborhood Progress, Inc. and the City of Cleveland as part of the Re-Imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland  project, suggests that the grassroots are literally and figuratively the answer.

She sees good change coming to cities such as Cleveland in two ways. One is the actual grassroots: developing a flexible framework of strategies for returning key areas, such as watersheds, to the green states and purposes nature intended, so “we can more easily adapt, grow and shrink.” Two is the metaphorical grassroots: Within the framework, giving ordinary residents the freedom to experiment with ways of cleaning and greening their own lots and reconnecting their neighborhoods to the changed spaces around them.

Land reuse thus becomes – you saw this coming – organic. But it’s not the same thing as just letting the city “return to nature,” Schwarz says.

Thousands of people still live there and can’t be displaced like heads of lettuce just because you need to clean the refrigerator. Plus, grand plans are hugely expensive, logistically complicated and obstructed by people’s ownership of – and emotional ties to – their property. They also can’t anticipate every circumstance and end up being rigid impediments to good sense and individual initiative.

So engaging everyday people in the process of creative change becomes essential – and an opportunity for innovation on every level. (Schwarz reports that a visiting Environmental Protection Agency member took a look at Cleveland and exclaimed, “This is an ecological-restoration bonanza!”) 

More than 50 small pilot projects are already underway in Cleveland neighborhoods, Schwarz says, and they range from restoring a tiny bit of prairie to phytoremediation (planting therapeutic species that will, for instance, clean the soil of heavy metals such as lead) to landscaping on vacant lots to make city blocks look cared-for and so reduce crime.    

Schwarz sees Cleveland’s encircling “Emerald Necklace” of parks eventually turning into a larger green network, an “emerald web” of restored watersheds and tree canopy connected to strings of neighborhood green patches. Though removing structures and creating a lot of green space sounds like a danger to the density a city needs to support public transit and other essential services, Schwarz calls it “managing decline in a way that actually promotes growth” – and cites the city of St. Paul, Minn., where the restored wetland that replaced a failing mall proved so attractive and desirable a spot that new homes were built around the edges of it.

Among planners and environmentalists, there’s a fair amount of argument about what will work best. But as Schwarz notes, the damage to places like Cleveland has already been done; it’s never going to be 1910 and the Midwest’s industrial heyday again. So such cities will have to create the best outcomes that they can with the hands they’ve been dealt.  

“We will have to choose,” she says. “We have to take some risks. There is no model. We have to be the model.”

Shrinking by design: Reinventing civilization for our own survival

Image by Neil Wilkinson

Small is big. But it needs to get bigger.

A lot of people don’t have a clue about this yet – they’re still operating as if the Earth were a planetary version of Lewis Carroll’s Mad Tea-Party, where anytime they soil or use up the resources on the table in front of them, all they have to do is shout “Clean cups! Clean cups!”, move over a seat and start consuming/defiling a fresh array of china and scones.

But, as Alice asked of the Mad Hatter, “What happens when you come to the beginning again?”  No answer came.

The fact is, we have at long last come to the beginning again. Humankind has depleted or damaged nearly every habitable spot on the planet, not just through appalling ignorance about, and willful disregard for, the places in which we originally lived, but by constantly moving away from our hideous messes to the more pristine land just beyond. And then making more messes.

We’ve destructively expanded so much that we’re running out of everything we need to survive, both physically and economically – including time. So what now?

Luckily, David Beach has more answers than the Mad Hatter. He says we have to reduce – not just our individual consumption, not just our carbon footprint, but also the physical boundaries of the land we use. We have to live differently.

For a long time, the environmental movement has been focused on stopping pollution, said Beach, founder of EcoCity Cleveland  and director of the Green City Blue Lake Institute at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. But that approach goes only so far: With every corner of the planet connected and affected by shared air, water, weather and other natural systems, environmental poisoning can’t be stopped by shutting off some smokestacks or industrial drain pipes here and there, he explained during a recent interview at Green City Blue Lake’s offices. The problem hasn’t been caused by a few industries or nations.

“There’s not a bad guy that you can blame,” Beach said. “”It’s the design of our civilization. The only way to cure that is to have more of a design approach that helps everyone change their lives.”

In cities such as Cleveland, which combine aging industrial cores with suburban sprawl, he said, it’s imperative to have a regional plan that deals with the shifting population, decrepit  and/or abandoned buildings, toxic soil and water, and paved-over environments trapping the area in its physical and economic state of decay. For these metropolitan areas, Beach envisions much smaller, but much more densely populated, urban centers that are livable, walkable, affordable and enticing, with multi-unit residential building in mixed-use neighborhoods full of green spaces and efficient public transit that will entice suburbanites to move back in. That will mean dismantling a lot of foreclosed and emptied-out neighborhoods – not just pulling down and removing unsavable structures, but figuring out what to do with the suddenly vacant land.

A lot of choices exist.  Reforestation, gardens and urban farms, parks: “All of those work for me,” said Jim Rokakis, Cuyahoga County Treasurer and a founder/director of the county’s new Land Bank  . He explained that in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, many neglected old buildings and homes are past saving. Renovation would be prohibitive. Tearing them down is costly, too: With 18,000 homes to remove at $8,000-$10,000 each, it will take upwards of $150 million. The county doesn’t have that kind of money.

But the land bank can take over foreclosed properties, pay down the assumed debt with the $8 million per year in tax collection from the county treasurer’s office, and make the land available for inventive uses, Rokakis said. 

The change that results from land reuse in Cleveland – or Detroit or Miami or any of thousands of cities worldwide – sounds drastic and is. No one wants to have to suffer the kinds of catastrophes that require change on this scale, whether recessions, floods or wars. On the other hand,  no one can deny that catastrophes often eventually lead to rebirths of the best kind, letting redesigned, rebuilt cities and whole nations leap-frog into the future. 

But as Beach said, smart, effective, sustainable, economically positive redesigns can’t happen without regional plans.  Northeast Ohio – and probably a lot of other places –  doesn’t have one.

More about that next time.

Art and green-building innovation rolled into one

Photo by Thomas Hawk

For at least a decade now, we’ve been told that our civilization is going paperless. Most of us have heard that prophesy, looked around at the stacks of Kleenex and 8-by-11-inch printer sheets we go through, and had ourselves a good snicker.

Even if newspapers, magazines and books do at last end up entirely on our glowing screens, we’re still going to have an awful lot of  waste paper lying around from the previous few centuries of reading, writing, sneezing and wrapping. Fortunately, Ratko Maltar has a creative idea for what to do with it. 

Maltar, a native Croatian now living in the Northeast Ohio area of the United States, has figured out  a process for rolling used sheets of  paper such as magazine pages into small, sturdy “beams” that can be formed into panels or blocks for building materials or used to create artistic shapes and images. He  calls the process “Irogami” (color folding) and has developed eight different ways of rolling the sheets. Depending on what kinds of paper he uses, the beams can be plain or brightly patterned.  

This could keep a lot of  TIMEs and Tiger Beats out of our landfills. Maltar’s plan to develop a  computer program allowing designers to experiment virtually with Irogami constructions, images and holograms may even bring help us consider our promised “paperless society” with somewhat straighter faces.

Maltar came to the U.S. 13 years ago and started out working for Lincoln Electric in the Cleveland area, he said.  ”It was my dream to come here and I had to sacrifice [for years] to come here” to America,  Maltar said. 

Eventually, with experience in fields he lists as operations analysis, quality control, marketing analysis and new-product development for electronics and machinery manufacturers (”I like numbers”), Maltar took the next step and became an inventor and entrepreneur, putting his expertise to good use on Irogami. 

He hopes to find public and private partners to help him develop the technology for all of his Irogami applications, because he sees his invention having a positive social impact as well as an economic one: helping the environment as a green building material, providing an inexpensive and versatile art and design tool for students and professionals alike, and providing everyone – from  children to prisoners -with an agreeable, therapeutic craft.

Said Maltar, “You get calm, you have busy fingers, you start to think in prudent way.”

Got MLK? For some, that glass still isn’t full

My husband and I marked our 23rd anniversary this weekend. Before going out to dinner, we went to the art museum in hopes of catching the big touring Gauguin exhibit before it closed. It was sold out for the day, but that was ok – we stayed to revisit the fabulous permanent collection.

While we were wandering through the Winslow Homers and Thomas Eakinses,  I heard someone call my name and turned to discover a friend of mine named Tracey coming into the gallery with her partner. I hadn’t seen either of them in a long time and, in the course of chatting, I mentioned that we were celebrating our anniversary. Tracey said, “It’s our anniversary, too!” and asked how long we’d been together. When we asked the two of them the same thing, Tracey said nine years and her partner said 10. We all laughed a little about that, and then Tracey said, “Well, our date isn’t is as exact as yours.” 

Tracey and her partner are gay.  They love each other, have made a home together over many years and have the same deep bonds of affection, life experience and mutual reliance as any long-wedded couple. But in our state, they are not allowed to marry.

On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we can be astonished at how far our nation has come in the struggle for civil rights for all people. But as long as we deny some of our fellow citizens their freedom from prejudice, deny them equal treatment and opportunity, our work is not done and our  society is not a success.

In this, as in so many things, creativity is an answer – a path to tolerance. At Geniocity.com, we talk about the many benefits of  creativity and innovation, from scientific advances and wiser laws to more adventurous art and better-educated children. But the greatest result of creativity is open minds.

That should be reason enough to encourage it. And yet, I know it won’t be sufficient for those who like their progress to be lucrative. If you’re among them, you may be interested to hear that the reverse is also true: Tolerance is a path to creativity. The more accepted and encouraged people feel, the more imaginative and productive they are. The freer they feel to live, think, speak and experiment, the more great inventions, discoveries and artistic expressions they create. And the more creations people bring forth, the more we all prosper - materially, intellectually and spiritually.

Equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people will be our nation’s next big breakthrough - a throwing open of doors in our brains and hearts that have long locked in fear and locked out sense. It’s going to happen eventually, so let’s speed it up and stop wasting the talents of Americans who’ve been repressed, threatened and cheated out of the peaceful open life that could allow them – and us as a nation – to flourish.

I’d like to live in a country where fine human beings such as Tracey and her partner can have a wedding anniversary as other couples do. I’d like them to have the freedom to imagine and dare that comes, paradoxically, when you feel that you truly belong. I’d like the word American to mean a people and a culture that value, yes, the content of each individual’s character, but also the vision, the originality of thought and the skill that fill our individual heads - and that don’t care which consenting adults our sexual organs attract us to.

What about you?

Can arts and culture make waves with ‘Ripple Effect’?

The U.S. arts-and-culture sector has been searching for a long time for the most effective way to tell its own story – the story that will finally and reliably convince Americans that arts and culture matter tremendously to our society, provide real benefits for everyone and deserve to be nurtured and taught, practiced and promoted and, above all, financially supported.

How can the Joe Six-Packs and soccer moms of the 50 states be persuaded to care about cultural enrichment so much that they’ll write checks and vote for more taxes?

Opinions on that have changed over the decades. In the 1960s, arts and culture were perceived and/or positioned to represent the values of great European civilizations American G.I.s had seen first-hand in World War II and the Great Society they hoped to build at home: They were the marks of a gifted, prosperous and benevolent people. Over the next 40 years, as the pendulum of political and economic reality has swung between closed minds and tight fists on the one extreme and orgiastic abandon with money and self-expression on the other, arts and culture have gone from extolling their effects on soul, spirit and status to emphasizing their impacts on economic development and students’ academic success. 

The latter arguments have been working pretty well in some communities lately, especially with civic leaders and elected officials desperate to help their cities survive the current recession and the larger transition to high-tech knowledge economies requiring trained creative workforces.  But those aruments are rather complicated – and the general public doesn’t respond to complicated terribly well.  What it responds to is the likes of “Eat Mor Chikin.”  

So now the Fine Arts Fund in Cincinnati, Ohio, believes it has discovered a simpler and better message for arts and culture – one that will make the difference with its own community and others. A study the fund released Monday finds that the phrase “Ripple Effect” best and most vividly conveys to the general public the idea of benefits spreading from arts and culture to everybody. In addition, it finds that two specific kinds of good effects prove most inspiring to members of the public and most likely to elicit their financial support for arts and culture. First: that vibrant, activity-filled neighborhoods result from arts and culture. Second: that arts and culture can connect and bring together a community’s diverse residents. 

The study closely resembles a business-branding process. It used focus groups of diverse area residents to test what arts benefits and catch-phrases captured people’s imaginations, gave them the message that arts and culture make their community better, and fired enthusiasm about “sharing responsibility” (i.e. financially supporting) arts and culture.

” ‘Ripple effect’ is a kind of shorthand – people have a common understanding of what that is,” said Margy Waller, vice president/arts & culture partnership for the Fine Arts Fund. “It’s a way of starting a conversation with them. People get very excited about it.”

The two particular ripples that move them to take action on behalf of the arts imply a kind of economic benefit – neighborhoods where there’s a lot of good, engaging, connecting activity going on - but don’t stress dollars-and-cents issues or training and educational outcomes. That’s because those issues tended to elicit undesirable responses from the focus groups, the report explains: Pitching educational benefits led people to zero in on the needs of children, not the  broader community, while the topic of economic development resulted in people thinking about other economic factors, such as jobs  and natural resources, that they believed were more important than the arts.

The study concludes that the “Ripple Effect” concept has the power to reorient people’s perceptions of arts and culture, that it “positions arts and culture as a public good – a communal interest in which all have a stake – and provides a clearer picture of the kinds of events, activities and institutions that we are talking about.”  Once the two specific ripples of vibrant neighborhood and connected residents have enlisted people’s enthusiasm and active support of arts and culture, then the community conversation can expand to include other arts-related benefits, Waller said.  

 The study may represent the first time anyone has scientifically applied a standard business-branding process to arts advocacy. But arts advocacy has long embraced the very similar processes of political and advertising campaigns in trying to get legislation passed, tax issues approved and candidates elected.

What’s at all new about the “Ripple Effect” seems to be the specific tweak given to the arts-and-public-benefit argument. And whether the study’s conclusions are borne out or not will depend on how the Fine Arts Fund and other cultural groups put that tweaked message to use, said Tom Schorgl, president and CEO of the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture in Cleveland, Ohio. Questions such as where the ripple message will be aimed geographically within Cincinnati, what kinds of neighborhoods will be targeted, and what success will look like need to be answered before the ripple concept can be called effective and useful, Schorgl said.

Americans for the Arts, the national service organization for the arts and culture sector which has been following the development of the study, will likely help get word out about it by providing information to Americans for the Arts members, said Mara Walker, the organization’s chief operating officer. In trying to get people to recognize the value of the arts, she added, “you need as many arguments in your pocket as possible.”

That means the way to reach community leaders about arts and culture may still be through economic development and education, even if the “Ripple Effect” ends up favorably influencing the general public. Because which argument works best, Walker said, really depends on who you’re talking to.

Mek Mor Rippuls

Feed thy soul … and stomach?

So is cooking art?

The idea that it is seems to be gaining traction, and not just among foodies. Dinner comes out of contemporary restaurant kitchens these days looking like architecture (or at least a vertical section of sedimentary strata) and featuring exotic combinations of ingredients that turn ordinary menus into what read like excerpts from Dune (and, maybe someday, seafood into winged codpieces….). Cooking shows make the poaching of eggs and the chopping of jicama a drama a la Rambo. The raspberry sauce drizzled around molten chocolate cake resembles an unsigned Pollock.

Iron Chef Michael Symon even shared a 2008 Cleveland Arts Prize for bringing national attention to the city’s culinary creativity.  

 But the question has continued to drift through my head like the dubious aroma of mystery meat as I’ve watched Julie & Julia - the recent movie about famed chef Julia Child and the disciple who tries to make every one of the recipes in Child’s book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking – and subsequently read Child’s memoir, My Life in France.

Clearly, kitchen geniuses such as Symon and Child have many things in common with artists. Their creativity leads them to experiment with new and surprising combinations of elements. They possess an eye for presentation that’s pleasing in color, form, texture and composition. Their rigorous attention to craft ensures the highest and most consistent quality of execution and result. And on top of all that, they’ve worked hard to gain a thorough knowledge of, and expertise with, all the tools of their discipline, from foodstuffs to pastry bags. I suspect that Rembrandt did not know more about light and paint and canvas than Child knew about heat and meats and pans.

And if someone argued that food can’t be art because it disappears by the end of dinner, I’d have to point out that many works, such as avant-garde performance pieces, are intentionally ephemeral and are no less art because of it.  

But I would agree that food – and cooking – are not art. And here’s why: Art is about content, about an emotional or intellectual message of some sort that the artist is trying to impart to his audience. And food and cooking don’t have any.

Food can create a mood. Heavy and dark? Light and frothy? Comforting? Challenging? Yes. But you won’t find what’s on your plate deliberately leading you to evaluate human relationships, feel loss, ponder the effects of technology or consider death. (I mean, if it did, would you want to eat that?) Like most art, well-prepared food does delight the senses, but it doesn’t inform and enrich the mind. Instead it nourishes the body.

That’s not art. But I think you could call it love.

(Photo, top, from Sweet Mary)