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.

Theater, politics and technology join Geniocity.com’s range of topics

To Geniocity.com’s newest bloggers, welcome!

And to our readers, I’d like to invite you to enjoy the first posts of Terrence Spivey, artistic director of Karamu House; Leonard Steinbach, cultural technology expert; and Seth Rosenberg, politics writer, whose insights and particular senses of humor will make reading about the latest innovative twists in their fields both eye-opening and entertaining for all of us.

I look forward to many more such introductions, as we at Geniocity.com continue to expand our range of subjects and writers and our means of connecting you to the creative cutting edge. We don’t want the communication to be one way, either. We want to hear what you think – about individual posts, about Geniocity.com as a whole and about the directions in which inventiveness is taking humanity.

Thanks for being part of the conversation and the adventure.

Political partying

Last night, I went to a fund-raising event for a local politician who’s running for re-election this fall.  Being of the journalist persuasion, I’ve attended such things in the past only as a working reporter for a major daily, so finding myself there as a private citizen with my business cards in my pocket felt a little odd.

But not that odd, as it turns out – the crowd was made up pretty entirely of members of the arts community I’ve covered and known well for years and I quickly discovered that it’s fun to network with people I already know and like a lot, but who haven’t necessarily heard about my new business yet.

I’m capable of making myself converse with roomfuls of total strangers, but I don’t enjoy it much. Ok, that’s an understatement - generally speaking, I’d rather unstop toilets all day than walk up to circles of people I’ve never seen before and engage them in chitchat.

So while I realize that the point of networking is to expand the number of people who know me and my company, it sure was nice to walk into a party and realize that I was never going to be able to catch up with all the people I wanted to talk to before the evening ended. 

It’s also clear that politics offers a great way of connecting with the people likeliest to share the ideas and value the mission my business champions. I have to believe that supporting candidates and issues would be a good guerrilla-marketing strategy for any business that wants to be – or at least doesn’t mind being – associated with certain philosophies and positions.

So I had another V-8 moment in my ongoing self-education as an entrepreneur. Only one problem: Political support costs a lot more than a can of juice.