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.

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?

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?

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)

Journalists need Creativity 101

Peter Friedman’s blog post yesterday on this site  about how well law school prepares people to be lawyers got me thinking about how well journalism school  - and journalism itself – prepares and encourages people to be good reporters, opinion-writers and editors. 

My own experience of journalism school was perhaps unusual – the curriculum was designed to cover the basics of news-gathering and -writing, media law and analyzing statistical surveys, along with photography and layout for those interested, but because I was preparing to be a theater critic, I found I had to essentially construct my own course of study. There were no classes that really delved into the evaluation of creative work or that examined the purpose, ethics and goals of  criticism, much less any that offered regular opportunities to practice the craft of reviewing.

Perhaps because I took an unusual path within  my profession, it seemed to me that the standard curriculum did little more than indoctrinate students in a rote style of newswriting and narrow categories of  news coverage that the business had adopted generations ago and that had slowly hardened into a kind of industry-wide arteriosclerosis that kept journalism from significantly changing and adapting along with the times. There were, to quote a Paul Simon song, “no times at all – just the New York Times.”    

Like law schools, apparently, J-schools also seem to attract people as professors who have very little real experience of the trade. Many of my own teachers were either theorists who examined the media’s effects on society rather than how to put out a great newspaper or nuts-and-bolts newscraft instructors who had left the profession years earlier because, apparently, they weren’t much good at it.  

And like the law, the journalism industry itself has been run largely by people rewarded for sticking with business as usual, rather than being notable innovators or even just good managers.

Journalism doesn’t prepare its practitioners to be managers; it simply moves reporters or ad salesmen or production folks into higher positions, to deal with people and administrative tasks when their skills lie in digging up information, scribbling, hustling ad space or designing pages. Lacking any real training in their new power jobs, they often resort to copying the older editors or managers around them, perpetuating bad leadership habits and old, entrenched ideas of what a news publication should be. That some good managers emerge is evidence of natural individual talent rather than an astutely planned and run system.

I suppose the status quo becomes gospel in any industry, but it’s particularly inexcusable in a business that’s supposed to be all about what’s new. In medicine, they say “Physician, heal thyself.”  In journalism, it ought to be, “Editor, broaden your own darned mind – or you’ll never get your readers to broaden theirs.”

Imagination and creativity have to be encouraged in both the newsroom and the  J-school classroom. Students must be shown how to think differently, to try new approaches with every story and every photograph or video; editors must stop copying other publications’ tiny steps forward and boldly experiment, not just with the individual elements of news publishing ,but with the concept of news itself, and let their staffs come up with fresh ways of communicating information.

My guess is that, right now, the J-schools are actually ahead of the industry on this.  With young, electronics-savvy students  flowing into their programs, many schools have embraced the Internet as the primary medium of the news and are investing in the state-of-the-art equipment and spirit of re-invention with which they need to explore this new frontier, while the economically ravaged professional news industry struggles to overcome its own ossification and get up to speed before it truly and finally dies of shortsightedness, cowardice and a dangerously low idea count.  

Someone – I think it was a character in the Steve Carell movie, Dan in Real Life - once said, “Love isn’t a feeling – it’s an ability.” I would say the same thing about creativity - and journalism needs to develop it.

The creative dimension

Albert Einstein understood time and space.

No duh, you say. But I’m not talking about theoretical physics, at which Einstein was probably our most celebrated genius. I’m talking about another kind of genius he had: the twin gifts of understanding that time and space are valuable and of making sure he had plenty.

I’ve been reading the Walter Isaacson biography of Einstein, who was (I think few would argue) one of the most creative humans the planet has ever produced. What impresses me the most so far is that Einstein instinctively knew how to get what he needed and what he needed was opportunities to think.

How many do you have? Likely not enough.

Me, either. Our culture isn’t conducive to it, which means our culture isn’t conducive to creativity. We’re all frantically sending and answering e-mails and texts, updating our statuses (stati?), cruising the Web, downloading stuff, watching stuff, reading stuff, working, driving, dealing with each other. We really don’t have time to absorb information, slowly process it, experiment with it and invent big ideas from it.  

Instead, most of us produce what feels like the mental equivalent of carbonation – a lot of little fizzy notions bubbling out of the turmoil in our heads, as if our skulls were constantly shaken cans of Coke. Those ideas seldom last long. 

Einstein’s, on the other hand, seem likely to last eons. They were the result of years of concentrated thought, thought that was remarkably impervious to distractions from daily work, children, spouses and the state of the world, but that also demanded a great deal of time alone. He eventually arranged his life so that thinking was what he was paid to do, and the privacy to do it in was insured by indulgent universities and his motherly second wife, who had a separate bedroom and took care of all the day-to-day household business so his thoughts didn’t have to include laundry.

Most of us will never have gigs like that and are maybe even glad of it. The truth is, Isaacson explains, that Einstein was a person who never allowed his emotions to get  too deeply embroiled in relationships or events; he cared, yes, but there was a kind of inner fence around his feelings, protecting him from investing too much psychic energy in things that didn’t ultimately matter to him as much as science. Probably most of us wouldn’t want to be like that, at least with our families and friends.

I wouldn’t. But I still envy him the long, uncluttered hours he had in which to create and I worry that my e-mail will become such a time pit that I’ll end up never getting to eat, shower or sleep, much less think.  Maybe the hardest part of being creative, in the end, isn’t pushing our intellects to the limit, but finding the willpower to shut out the din of a world too in love with its own noise.

A good knight’s work

Barack Obama seems to be setting a good example of not letting fear stymie creativity.

In his speech to Congress last night, the U.S.president countered the absurd rumors circulating about health-care reforms (death panels, incipient communism) by bluntly calling them what they are: lies. He also made it pretty clear that he’s not going to cave on the innovative elements he wants to see in a revised health-insurance program, such as a “marketplace” of insurance options, including government-sponsored plans, for individuals and employers of varying means to choose from. He also pointed out – not insultingly, but unmistakably – that supporters of the Bush administration are in no position to question the cost of providing health care to the American people when they’re the ones who overwhelmingly supported spending billions on the Iraq war and cutting taxes for the extremely rich.

It was a speech that rode in, took an unshakable moral and policy stance and delivered knockout offensive blows while simultaneously conveying fresh ideas and the hope and expectation that  left and right will unite in an effort to think up even more.  

Whether or not you like the ideas or Obama himself, you’d have a hard time claiming that it wasn’t a bold speech. And boldness – guts, spine, heart and brains – is what we need more of in our thinking and our actions. It takes courage to invent new ways of solving our problems, but it take even more to make sure the best ones are put to use, in spite of other people’s reluctance, resentment, knee-jerk opposition and attempts at sabotage .

P.S. And how nice to see a president act boldly in the interest of actually helping people. Maybe before Obama’s term is up, all of us will be able to afford annual check-ups.

Copyrighting creativity and just … copying

Interesting bout last night at the Cleveland Institute of Art. The final score?

Cheaters – 2, poor creative people – zip

I shouldn’t be surprised, and yet I find myself dumbstruck all over again that those humans who invent and express are essentially helpless to prevent all the others from making off with the fruit of that creative work and draining the profitability from it . .. unless the inventive, expressive people are already rich. And how many of you are? Uh huh. That’s what I thought.  

The occasion was a forum on intellectual property and the arts presented by the COSE Arts Network  and its leader cum Geniocity.com arts blogger, Matt Charboneau. It featured guest speakers Mark Hosler of the band Negativland;  Cleveland-area intellectual-property attorney Sharon Toerek; and Peter Friedman, professor of law at Case Western Reserve and Detroit universities and also Geniocity.com’s law blogger. Hosler spoke about the process and effect of creating Negativland’s audio and video collages from bits of other people’s work. The two legal experts explored the questions of what can be protected by copyright and what can’t, why, and what to do about either scenario.

What bothered me was not the fact that artists and inventors copiously borrow ideas and styles from each other and always have. Building on earlier ideas and discoveries allows inventors to progress farther faster. Influences and allusions add profound cultural value to works of art and serve as a kind of shorthand, efficiently and effectively conveying meaning to an audience or market with shared experiences.

No issue about that here. Ditto the notion of using identifiable snippets of existing works, as Hosler does, to create quite  new and different ones, or satirizing or parodying whole works as Weird Al Yankovic and the National Lampoon have. That’s all good.

What bugs me is bootleggers. These people – I use the term loosely – take artists’ and inventors’ painstakingly imagined and created works, make cheap, usually illegal, direct copies and circulate or sell them, reducing demand for the  originals and income for those whose mental and physical efforts generated them. And they have since art began, making unauthorized folios of Shakespeare’s plays, faking Rembrandts and Picassos and clandestinely taping concerts.  

I know that many artists these days think this is actually just fine – they believe that music or whatever should be free to all, especially now that the Internet exists and none of us can stop the world from getting access to practically everything. They regard all this sharing as free publicity, which it certainly is. But at what point do the sheer love of creating and the thrill of getting known cease to be sufficient benefits to artists who make something for which there is evidently some demand? When do artists and inventors – so often expected to donate their work and be satisfied with a rich soul – deserve to insist that they be paid for their creativity and labor?

It’s hard enough to to turn art or invention into a living without pirates duplicating your unique creation so thoroughly that it becomes as common and monetarily worthless as dirt. As Toerek explained last night, artists can protect their work by copyrighting it, but two facts make this less reassuring. One: officially registering a copyright – the legal process that allows a creator to collect punitive damages from pirates – costs $45 a pop, Toerek said, which may not sound like much unless you’re broke or prolific, like many artists. And two, the fact is that only rich artists can really afford to sue pirates or - coincidentally - to give their work away on the Internet. 

Most of the rest, like any car-part manufacturer or baker – would like to support themselves decently by selling what they make to consumers, whether those consumers are audiences, collectors, shoppers or mass-producers such as publishing houses. 

I’m not saying that the world owes creative people a special living. Like anyone else, they should have to use their skills to compete for gigs, commissions and pay. But also like anyone else, they should have the right to try to create a profitable market for their work. 

They don’t. Not anymore, because the Internet by its very nature discriminates against creators of  original work that can be downloaded and/or mass-duplicated. And unlike Disney or Gucci or U2, most artists can’t do anything about it.

Well – there’s one thing they might be able to try. Hosler explained a bit about Creative Commons, a recent and growing attempt by artists to take back some control of their work by licensing it to people online in return for being credited with authorship.  I don’t get the impression that it will help guarantee artists proper payment,  but it looks like an imaginative start in the right direction.

On the road

For the next few days, I’ll be visiting St. Louis, getting a thorough soaking in the preoccupations of college-age kids who think my age group is already all wet. You’ll find periodic reports here on what’s new and creative among their set, as well as among educators, on campus and in what was once, stirringly, the Gateway to the West, but has now become – at least in my mind – more familiarly known as the place that gave us T.S. Eliot and toasted ravioli.

One of these things was genius. Stay tuned to find out which.

This way to weird cooking.

Are creative and crazy the same thing?

Back in January, I wrote about some theories related to the scientific causes of  creativity. One of them was about a possible relation or similarity between schizophrenia and creativity - a study done three years ago found that the behavior of some highly creative people is rather like that of people with the mental illness.

Now comes a study that finds a certain gene mutation may result in intense creativity in some people and in schizophrenia or psychosis in others. The scientific community will probably want to see this mutation examined further before subscribing to this one study’s results, but the connection is intriguing. I just hope people don’t use it to reinforce the widely held notion that artists are nuts.

  Read the story and see what you think.

Cat images painted by artist Louis Wain during the period when he became schizophrenic.