profound thoughts

There is this popular notion in our society that an artist, or sometimes even a scientist, but in any case a brilliant creative mind, should be poor and frustrated in order to produce great works. I am not just talking about financial poverty, but also a huge lack of luck and not to mention love. According to this myth then and only then could works of grace be composed.

There is some romanticism to this notion. It sounds very poetic that someone composed marvelous sonnets only after he felt the devastating pain of star-crossed love or that another one constructed brilliant theories after being kicked out of the scientific establishment. These stories have a lot of drama to it, per aspera ad astra, and many times they indeed are true, but nevertheless they should never be used to make a causal link between pain and creativity, for such link is plain wrong and I’m about to prove why. The dangerous aspect of it is that it can lead to political management which will keep the most brilliant of minds on the margins of society, presumably for their own benefit. Can we afford that?

The origins of this idea may be very old and I assume they go back centuries ago, to the dawn of religions, mostly of judea-catholic kind, but others too. The idea of the beneficial aspects of pain is strong in almost every religion; not just that martyrs, prophets and buddhas often went trough immerse amounts of psychological and physiological suffering on their way to wisdom and bliss, but that path was also later on propagated and preached about as beneficial for their enlightenment.

Although it would be very interesting to investigate these ideas back to their past, it would also be beyond the scope of this article. During the recent times they were profoundly amplified by political agendas of both extreme sides; on one end Stalinists had to keep their intellectuals in check by giving them a healthy dose of starvation (nothing can be better for writing novels than a few winters in Gulag), on the extreme right side some thought no better. Pain and suffering are on the pedestal of our ways to glory, even in creative pursuits. Just look at the Jesus and his passion.

Further this myth got a life of its own with an abundant body of ‘evidence’. Almost every poet of romantic period had his heart crushed like a china tea set under the bulldozer, Russian writers wrote their best works at -40ºC, Rembrandt or Hals often didn’t even have money for the canvases on which to paint, and let’s not forget the poor old van Gogh and his madness. Just how can you create anything without at least some level of schizophrenia, maniac disorder or clinical depression, right? And while we're at it, lets add a few suicide attempts on top of it all. The number of such examples is overwhelming and yet I claim there is absolutely NO evidence whatsoever to make such a causal link between pain and creativity, in fact it is exactly the opposite, and I’ll let Mr. Taleb explain why:

Assume that you're able to find a large, assorted population of rats: fat, thin, sickly, strong, well- proportioned, et cetera. (You can easily get them from the kitchens of fancy New York restaurants.) With these thousands of rats, you build a heterogeneous cohort, one that is well representative of the general New York rat population. You bring them to my laboratory on East Fifty-ninth Street in New York City and we put the entire collection in a large vat. W e subject the rats to increasingly higher levels of radiation (since this is supposed to be a thought experiment, I am told that there is no cruelty in the process). At every level of radiation, those that are naturally stronger (and this is the key) will survive; the dead will drop out of your sample. We will progressively have a stronger and stronger collection of rats. Note the following central fact: every single rat, including the strong ones, will be weaker after the radiation than before.

An observer endowed with analytical abilities, who probably got excellent grades in college, would be led to believe that treatment in my laboratory is an excellent health-club replacement, and one that could be generalized to all mammals (think of the potential commercial success). His logic would run as follows: Hey, these rats are stronger than the rest of the rat population. What do they seem to have in common? They all came from that Black Swan guy Taleb's workshop. Not many people will have the temptation to go look at the dead rats.

Next we pull the following trick on The New York Times: we let these surviving rats loose in New York City and inform the chief rodent correspondent of the newsworthy disruption in the pecking order in the New York rat population. He will write a lengthy (and analytical) article on the social dynamics of New York rats that includes the following passage: "Those rats are now bullies in the rat population. They literally run the show. Strengthened by their experience in the laboratory of the reclusive (but friendly) statistician/philosopher/trader Dr. Taleb, they . . . "

There is a vicious attribute to the bias: it can hide best when its impact is largest. Owing to the invisibility of the dead rats, the more lethal the risks, the less visible they will be, since the severely victimized are likely to be eliminated from the evidence. The more injurious the treatment, the larger the difference between the surviving rats and the rest, and the more fooled you will be about the strengthening effect. One of the two following ingredients is necessary for this difference between the true effect (weakening) and the observed one (strengthening): a) a degree of inequality in strength, or diversity, in the base cohort, or b) unevenness, or diversity, somewhere in the treatment. Diversity here has to do with the degree of uncertainty inherent in the process. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, 2007)

Got it? It’s not that poverty and pain somehow magically make people more creative and better at art, it is just that these are the ones who survive this aggressive selection (which has probably nothing to do with their artistic skills in the first place) to the point at which we can notice them and make the count! They are all that's left at the end and it is just too easy to make a causal link without taking a good look at all of the people who were perhaps even better at art or sciences, but just couldn’t bear the poverty, emotional suffering or any other kind of hardship. Before you make such a causal link, you must look at the large cemetery of never-to-be great artists who left art or even died for trivial reasons of poverty (let's call that negative evidence). Just how many great works were never realized! This field is an impossible dark hole, no one knows how big it is and of what level are the artists in it, because they never realized their potential. But it is clear that it exists and that it is much much bigger than the positive side which survived. Beware of it. There is next to nothing in poverty that makes you stronger, it is only a selection process which favors the already strong who actually get weaker in the process. To summarize; poor great artists were not great because of the poverty or the emotional drag, but in spite of it! I think that is a huge difference.

I know firmly from my own example and from friendships I have with other artists and scientists, that one works best when one is relieved of any other kind of disturbing thought or work. There is nothing better for the creative process than just pure thinking of the artistic or scientific problem one has in mind. If my career is marred with existential struggle, working menial jobs, living from hand to mouth and worrying about whether or not will I get trough the month, not much energy or time is left for artistic pursuit of a higher level. Of course some might say that that makes me use whatever I have left in much smarter way, since the days in which I could actually work are more scarce, but I take that as an insult. It is like preaching the health benefits of a fast to a starving homeless man. Oscar Wilde resolved that amazingly well in his essay The Soul of a Man under Socialism, here’s just one excerpt, but please do your self a favor and read it full:

It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of a personality, except on the imaginative plane of art. /.../ What I mean by a perfect man is one who develops under perfect conditions; one who is not wounded, or worried or maimed, or in danger. Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction. Byron’s personality, for instance, was terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the English. Such battles do not always intensify strength: they often exaggerate weakness. Byron was never able to give us what he might have given us. Shelley escaped better. Like Byron, he got out of England as soon as possible. But he was not so well known. If the English had had any idea of what a great poet he really was, they would have fallen on him with tooth and nail, and made his life as unbearable to him as they possibly could. But he was not a remarkable figure in society, and consequently he escaped, to a certain degree. Still, even in Shelley the note of rebellion is sometimes too strong. The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.
/.../
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor.” (Oscar Wilde, The Soul of a Man under Socialism, 1981).

There is big amount of real evidence (=controled studies) to support these claims; many studies show, that solving creative problems is best when people don’t think about the monetary rewards; this happens in two cases: either they enthusiastically work for free (and that really means for free, not for cheap, for free!) or they work for the very elusive amount of money which is not to small nor too big. If it is too small, people will feel robbed (why sell your best ideas that cheaply, or better yet, why even bother), and if it is too big, people will give them selves a hard time at simply trying too hard, which will block their open-mindedness that is crucial for creative work. In other words; people are the most creative when money is out of the picture, most likely by having just about enough of it.

Anecdotal evidence proves it too; the ancient Greeks had their best architecture built when democracy and economy flourished; artists were given enough freedom and monetary means to produce what is often still an unsurpassed classic in European architectural tradition. Once Greek democratic values and economic strength declined, arts and architecture did so too. Rome was in that regard a little behind it; Romans never got over the envy they had on Greeks, so in the best cases they only took it to the next level in technical terms (bigger structures, thinner columns, fancier materials...), but they were no match in artistic invention. The marriage between arts and politics was simply too tight for that and artists were too often used just as a propaganda tool. Still, very creative period, at least in engineering, at any rate way better than what followed; in the dark ages the tyranny of catholics left nothing for the artists outside bible illustrations for the illiterate peasants (and some illuminated manuscripts that never left the monasteries). This was a period of extreme ignorance and mental darkness. But then the Medici founded the Renaissance and individualism was back to be established. Arts and Sciences were fully developed and it is almost impossible to believe that it took just three to four generations in a city of no more than 50.000 inhabitants to spit out geniuses like Leonardo, Michelangelo, Bruneleschi, Raphael or Galileo to name just the most famous ones (look at a longer list here, which is still just the famous ones). Think about it: a city of 50.000 people, three or four generations, and so many prodigies! So much art! And all it took was a healthy dose of individualism (=independence from church or any other dogmatic authority) and the Medici family to sponsor it all. None of the Renaissance artists was a proverbial starving hobo, the way it should be according to the myth. No, they were very well founded and given the means to imagine and create. The greatest of them all were actually rich; Michelangelo was raised alongside the Medici heirs, almost as their brother, Galileo was also a full member of the Medici household and his lab had founds that would put many of todays scientists in shame, and Bruneleschi had been given a budget for his domes that todays architects see only in their wet dreams. To move forward; Kundera also writes about the periods in Czech literary history, when life was easy and arts flourished (I think that is in Ignorance, somehow the direct quote escaped me at the moment). In short; the best and the most of art was largely produced in times when poverty and suffering had a tendency to be removed from the lives of people who showed great intellect and creative potential. Period. Why again? Not just because we overlooked a part of statistical evidence (the cemetery of never realized artists and a notable amount of happy and wealthy artists like Michelangelo) but also because of the effects poverty and thus long term stress has on our brain.

Sapolsky talks about experiments with laboratory rats. It was shown very consistently trough out the studies that the rats which were given stimulative environment (=had to solve some puzzle to get food) developed thicker cortex (=were more intelligent) than the ones which were simply well fed without any prior challenge. Logically, those findings sold a lot of ‘stimulative’ toys and got many ‘stimulative’ educational programs right on track. So some level of training is indeed beneficial. But how much? In a minute. Let's go further: what was overlooked was that there were also rats with even thicker cortex that the ones from stimulative lab environments, and those were (guess what?) the rats from the natural environment. What could be more challenging than finding lunch every single day and not become one at the same time in the vicious environment of real life?! But now it gets interesting: because what was also not mentioned, even at that point, is the large cemetery of the rats that ran out of luck and became lunch, no matter how thick their cortex was. It is extremely important not to loose sight of the negative evidence which is also a result of such a 'stimulative' environment. Similar tests were made at which subjects (this time it could also be humans) had to perform a certain task in order to get a reward (food?) and then their dopamine level was measured in the frontal cortex. That would correspond to the amount of pleasure they get from solving the task. As long as there is some level of connection between problem solving and rewards, dopamine tends to go up. In some cases it is skyrocketing and these subjects who have to solve puzzles in order to get the reward are not just smarter but also much happier than the spoiled fatsoes who got food just for laying around. We are getting closer, aren't we. But dopamine levels dropped when the rewards didn't come or when it came in an insufficient amount that is not proportional to the level of the task prior performed. Especially if there was another subject at sight which got better rewards for the same kind of task! Ladies and gentlemen, social inequality is introduced. It's not about being poor, it is about feeling poor, that is to say, being in an unfair situation in comparison to others. Now the stress hormones kick in and what we are in fact doing is simulating the life of the poor. We haven't even mention the toxic effects the stress hormones have on brain, have we, but now seems about the right time to say it, because this is what it all comes about to. Frontal cortex or hippocampus (both of them associated with higher level thinking and creativity) suffer great atrophy as a result of long term exposure to stress hormones which are released by the feeling of poverty... As a result people under long term stress do much worse at any kind of cognitive functions. Kids who come from poorer environments have thinner frontal cortex as a result of stress hormones, even as early as the age of 5. At this point we could construct a completely separate argument, based purely on medical facts and controlled studies, stating a tight relationship between long term stress (as a result of poverty) and reduced intelligence and creativity. Sapolsky's 'Zebra book' is all about that. A very depressing book indeed. Long term stress, which is often caused by poverty, feeling of helplessness or any other similar state of life, will cause your brain to function worse. It will also make it far more vulnerable to almost any kind of brain damage; from clinical depression to schizoaffective disorders or even brain strokes, further we could list almost any form of dementia, elevated blood pressure, heart attacks... and it is not hard to prove how all of that affects artistic and scientific creativity in a very bad way. These are the medical facts which make the cemetery a little less frightening option, don't they, and these mechanisms actually make the tremendous number of never-to-be-realized artists in the first place. This is how the negative evidence is created.

Now I have to be honest; some milder level of poverty or at least insufficiency does force one to become more resourceful and more thoughtful. It is a form of training. It is also true that pain gives us a better view on life and perhaps makes us more grateful for the moments of happiness. Sometimes it indeed is true that some level of social, economical or emotional tensions do provoke one into thinking. Even this article wouldn't have happened if it weren't for the people who provoked me into pondering about this problem. I also know from my own life that my mind is much sharper now that I don’t have a regular job and when commissions are scarce. I see the world with a newly acquired level of clarity. But I will be able to realize these qualities if and only if I survive this crisis in the first place. Because that's what it is all about at such times, when challenges go far beyond beneficial training. It is all just about doing whatever it takes to survive or becoming yet another failed form of life in a long string of evolution. But one can ask oneself, are arts and sciences really about that or is something more at stake? In my view arts and sciences connect us with the higher awareness of our existence in the Universe, it is exactly that which makes us so profoundly human. Saying that one should be poor in order to produce great works is an insult. Not still an insult, but even more an insult, because it reduces artistic and scientific genius to the level of brutal survival race, where morality and whatever is the best in humanity is no more.

But let's give my argument one final test. Even if all of the above is actually not true, even if it is all just another fallacy, even if poverty somehow does improve clarity and depth of thought, and even if it might indeed have some good motivational factors to it after all, perhaps even to the point where it is sine qua non for great thinking and creating (at least to those who are not six feet under until now), I bet the artists aren’t the first nor the only ones who can benefit from it. I can safely assume that those insights could come handy to politicians (and especially politicians), economists, CEO’s, teachers, or whoever controls a portion of our lives and thinks that artists should live in poverty and suffering in order to work. If it is such a benefit, why not just join them!? As for me, I personally volunteer to 'take care' of your bank account and all your belongings while your search for the higher truths, compose symphonies or paint masterpieces.

The time of fat cows is usually a time when one needs not to think much. Things are going smoothly, everyone is happy, so why bother with something as costly, as risky, and as time consuming as thinking or even rethinking of basic assumptions upon which everything is built.

The times of ugly thin cows are however different. At such times it becomes clear that something must be either wrong with the logic (=reasoning) or the basic assumptions in itself. I don't know which is more deadly, but I think that in many cases logic is the easy part, it is clear and well built, and the assumptions are the ones to be ill defined.

During the last decades each branch of Art has become more and more self centered. The same happened in Sciences and there it costs us a lot more. Each science is captured into its own little world; psychologists don't bother reading medical journals, mechanical engineers see no reason to flip trough some biology and viceversa. They are enclosed into their own loops of references and cross-quotations, therefore mistakes are becoming inherently included into the very DNA of each field just as much as discoveries are. But the most devastating effects can be seen in domains that are by definition interdisciplinary, such as architecture.

Architecture has become more and more self centered over the years too. Part of that is because the 'market' forces architects for lower and lower budgets and therefore an architect is pushed to reduce costs of his own work by doing evermore himself. Of course one cannot be an expert in different fields and that leads to so much poorer projects. At the very end it leads to architectural projects that are about architecture and only about architecture. It sounds absurd at the beginning but it really isn't. Let me explain.

Architecture is not the only aspect of the architectural project, even though it is named after it. It really isn't. Each thing we build has so many different aspects to it that includes practically everything we are surrounded by; vegetation, animals, human biology, human relationships and behavior, social interactions (...) and all of that not just within the present moment, but in an everlasting flux of time, where change is the only constant and where everything is more or less unpredictable.

Most of the projects that we see today have no reference to anything except to itself and investors wishes. But instead of giving you negative examples, I'll give you a positive one.

The High Lane in NYC is a project that is built by a team of experts in different fields; architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, biology, social science... Walking there you can see how effortlessly everything fits together; the city, people, vegetation, city commute, social flux, everything. That kind of intimate interconnection of so many seemingly unrelated or even (again seemingly) opposite interests is possible only if people of different fields work together from the very beginning.

An other example would be Apple at its best of times. I avoided commenting or quoting Steve Jobs for a long time (everyone is doing it and most turn out to be ridiculous or pathetic), but I don't think I can avoid it at this moment. What Jobs knew is that a computing device is much much more than just electronics and software. It is actually more about the user and his/her needs, social interactions, biology or medical facts. That calls for interdisciplinary approach from the very beginning. Whoever thinks Apple's design is just about minimalism or pure aesthetics is profoundly mistaken.

But what most do is compose a project within their narrow field and then at the very end by force adjust it to fit the actual reality. In practice this looks like this: an architect designs a house very much as he would in the early 20th century, then electricians come and penetrate walls with hammers to make way for the internet network and somehow forcefully push house into the late 20th century. At the end a gardener is called to plant a little bit of grass, bushes and flowers in front of the house, you know, for decoration. The house has no interaction with the technology that is put into it nor the biological environment, simply because fields other than pure architecture were called in at the very end instead of working together from the scratch. The plants might as well have not be there and it would make no single difference. Since it is not included in the very concept of the project it gains no value from it.

Of course every ambitious project needs an enlightened leader, a visionary (this trait can rarely be a group thing) who connects everything together, but just as the trunk of the tree reaches a certain height, it inevitably has to spread into branches, so does the project have to divide among fields and subfields... that might be the only way to create rich and high-quality products or designs. The essence (or the spirit) of those projects is like a tree; simple yet complex and with a rich crown and equally rich root system that are reaching in every possible direction. What we have instead are just sticks that are one-dimensional and have no spread anywhere. Occasionally they glue a few other sticks on it, so it resembles a tree, but seriously, that's not a tree, or is it? Projects created in such fashion are devoid of any depth in their substance.

Note what I am not saying: I am not advocating neither tight specialization nor 'polymathism' of an individual. I'm rather taking the middle ground here; one has to be a specialist in one's field, but at the same time have a bird's eye view on what's happening elsewhere. Or even better; have also a secondary field of deep interest whic is completely different from the primary one. Being a professional in a field by definition to some degree excludes examining other domains of knowledge and creativity, but at least one needs not to be blind and more importantly IGNORANT about everything else. At the end of the day it is all about ignorance; people thinking they know enough and that there is no need to reach out of their comfort zone, and out of their own sandbox in which they play.

Therefore you now have architectural offices that employ nothing but architects; the same mistakes, limitations and dogmas spread over many people. Nobody is there to enrich the pool of knowledge and ideas or simply insert some shred of doubt into it. It took me a long while and a lot of introspection to figure out why I intuitively always found it impossible to work on a project with other designers and architects, but on the other hand why I almost always absolutely enjoy working with carpenters, fashion designers, woodsmen or people just outside of my field. Why would I want to have a (worse?) copy of myself to work with if I can have someone who knows so much more than me in a part of the project that is relevant for its success? I figured that I wouldn't dare to commence an architectural project without having a landscape architect by my side from the earliest of concepts... I would probably pick a construction engineer too, perhaps some high-tech guys from electronics and computer science, human behavioral biologists, painters... I could go on with this list.

The important thing is that one has to be aware of one's own limitations and inter-dogmatic mistakes that are inevitably built into each field. It is not responsible towards the client and society in general to create one-dimensional sticks instead of trees. It is not very professional either.

In the time of economical crisis we often hear different opinions on how to save stock market, what should be the price of oil, inflation this, deflation that, imports, exports, jobs, etc. A lot of economical mumbo jumbo which is there to cover the fact that we simply don't get it and that the world is far too complex for us to grasp (read Nassim Nicholas Taleb on that subject). But I believe some people are putting their honest hard work into solving this problem and in doing so i really miss discussion on one thing: Art! Not just that, budgets for fine arts and cultural activity are dramatically reduced trough out the world. I came to believe that is a critical mistake that will prolong this crisis for much longer than necessary.

Even more so: I would like to make an argument, that in order to solve the problem, we must invest in Arts like never before!

The problem is symptomatic on so many levels. A month ago Maribor held an opening ceremony as the cultural capital of Europe for 2012. It was extremely disappointing to me (although not surprising) that none of the speakers, not even the president of the state, recognized culture (which is to say fine arts, theater, dance, music, literature... in short, Art) as nothing more that mere entertainment which is to be visited/watched/listened after a hard days work.

How foolish and underestimating! Arts have never been just plain entertainment, at least not for those who devote their whole lives to it. Arts are an endless exploration of our inner worlds and capacities. It is a research in which we are trying to discover who we really are on a completely emotional and spiritual level. The more reason-based quest is left to science, but when done right, these two domains are really not so different at all. They are rather complimentary and mutually supportive. Trough Arts might be the only means of communication trough which we can really connect and reach each other the way rational conversation just can't do. It seems almost paradoxical that arts let us develop the highest possible form of individuality, and yet trough arts we most effective dissolve our differences. People of different ages, races and beliefs come together under the stage of a musician or they all gather in awe in front of the painting or a movie and share an experience that is unique.

The very fact that Arts are dealing with emotional stuff makes them so much harder. Art is just a simple craft if it doesn't deal with strong emotions. And strong emotions are a risky business which can be only coped by the strongest of us. It is no surprise then that artists are on the forefront of almost every social, cultural and even political change. It was always the artists who lead others into the dark and unexplored territory with a bright torch of fresh knowledge.

Secondly, Arts nurture a way of thinking that implements and cherish innovation. At the core of every artistic pursuit is defining or redefining new frontiers and seeing the existing things in new light. Arts have a lot to offer in a way of thinking. If we want to save economy, we need new ways of thinking, and even on a very pragmatic level, we need new inventions, new solutions...

Thirdly, Arts are a spinal cord of our very culture and I dare to say, our very existence. Think about it; at times of great wars, migrations or other highly agitated political actions, no art was produced. Nothing remained. It is almost as those times didn't exist. Politics comes and goes, at best it only serves the needs of today, technology evolves, but Art is what remains and what forms the heritage of our species. A good painting is just as good a good a painting now as it was at the time of creation. Even the most introvert and intimate Shakespeare's poetry is still a vivid document of the times he lived in. Arts offer us communication and connection trough generations and centuries. I can feel Michelangelo or Rachmaninoff as if he was speaking to me personally. If we cut Arts now, what will remain of us in 100, 200, 1000 or more years? What will they think of us? How will they understand our struggle?

It is of the outmost importance that we support research in Arts and Sciences. People who do it don't require much; just to cover for the basic needs of their work. Think about it; how much could have Tesla given us, if his work was properly founded. Or Van Gogh! Or Beethoven! (even from economical stand point, their heritage is worth billions of euros in tickets, cds, books... the price of a grant that they would require at the time of their lives is insignificant in comparison to what they produced) But instead we are being completely hypocritical by spending millions and millions of euros on van Gogh, who is already dead and has no benefit from all this... So why not rather give that money to a young artists who might turn it into majestic work of Art which will inspire people. At the end I think that it is just all about arrogance which stems from our denial of death. And that is at the core of the whole problem. Those who are aware of their own mortality and brief temporality need no explanation on what really matters.

During the last fall I did an interesting project with highschool students. Together we decided to print a calendar to collect donations for charity and some also for our work. Even though the project was a huge success and we raised a lot more money than we could realistically hope for, it was not without trouble. And as recent evaluation of the project showed, almost all the problems we experienced stem from the fact that adolescent psychological time perception is different than one of older adults.

Here's the problem: suppose you give a teenager three weeks to complete some project. To me that would mean that I prepare my first draft by the end of the first week, consult it with my mentor or peers, finish the corrected version by the end of the second week, consult again and finish the final version at least one day before the deadline (so I can sleep well or have some extra time in case of computer crash, printer malfunction, stuff like that...). Well, for an average teenager a deadline in three weeks would mean that they start working one or two days prior the deadline (let's not talk about results of such work). It is no different (rather worse) with regular school work. Most of them would admit that it makes no difference at all if the test is scheduled in three weeks or just in one. They would study the last day in either case.

Maybe this is the case just for Slovenia. Maybe this is the case just for our times. Perhaps in the times of feudal system, when the whole family was involved in farm planing (like planting seeds and collecting harvest), it was a little more obvious that there are certain deadlines within each season that should not be missed, because if they are, starvation follows.

So I don't really know whether this is a cultural or a temporal thing, but I have a hunch it goes deeper than that.

It was quite surprising to find a possible answer in Milan Kundera's latest novel Ignorance. There he discusses teenage suicide:

To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.

And I figure he is right. I remember that when I was a freshman at high school the graduation seemed like a distant dream. I thought it would never come to pass. But eventually it did and much quicker than I had supposed. It was like a little wake up call (the first of many, actually). Trough the following years I realized that things do happen, especially the predictable ones. So even though I have still trouble believing it, being old and eventually death will happen to me too (if I'm lucky enough). I think adolescents are biologically not equipped yet to perceive future in such way simply because they haven't experienced much of it yet. You can't blame them for that, you can only take that into account when you plan to work with them.

So if you think about it, many problems of education could easily be solved if school work was organized according to this principle. What we have instead was already debated here and I don't want to elevate my blood pressure again.

If you are further interested in this topic, there is a whole chapter on it in Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational. Backed up with hardcore experimental data and all that.

EDIT: what I forgot to mention is that time perception changes over years in either case. Most people (like 95%) would agree that time goes by faster when you get older. Experiments confirm that. In some cases they played a song or a sound to a bunch of people and older folks regularly give shorter estimate of the time that actually passed. Sometimes they just keep them waiting and the results get even more dramatic. Of course, there are several theories (=reasons) why this might be that way. Some argue that when you are 30 one year of life feels proportionally less than when you are 10. Then there are theories that metabolism slows down with age so there are less "beats" per year, thus less time perceived. There is also one line of reasoning that states that we perceive time by the amount of new events. Surely enough, there are many more fresh experiences in the life of a child than in the one of an older person. I think there is some truth to all theories and that they might work together... So it is more or less a biological fact that older people perceive much less psychological time in the same amount of physical time ... To younger people three weeks just seem longer than to older folks, that is why they fail to plan their future accordingly. (and even to older people 5 years of future seems a much longer time than 5 years of past).

EDIT 2 (as of 3rd December 2012): It is actually all about frontal cortex and how it makes you do the hard thing (=study) instead of the easy impulsive one (=play). See Sapolsky's lecture here.

For a long time I didn't actually know what bothers me about professional critics in art, music, literature... I mean; there are many things that one could argue. Yes, they tend to use pretentious language, overcomplicated sentences and descriptions that could be told a lot simpler. And yes; none of them is quite as productive (or creative) as the artists. IMHO even the worst artist is still a bit better than most critics - at least he tried to make something that could only later be criticized, right? Creation always comes first. But that still doesn't capture the essence of it. Because there are critics that did contribute to our understanding of art after all.

Only after I read Susan Sontag's "On Photography" for the second time it became clear to me. Everything that she says is more or less true, even more so, everything is valuable for our understanding of art. But (and that is a big but): is it relevant? Are artists (in that case photographers) really concerned with all what she says or assumes Are they really after all that? Or is it just something that a critic (e.g. somebody who never actually did art) thinks they are.

In my opinion not. What I came to believe, as a creative person, is that most true artists are generally concerned with only one thing: getting it right. Can you remember the time you were arranging family photos on the shelf and none of the arrangements didn't quite fit? And then, perhaps by a sudden inspiration or by pure luck you happen to find the right arrangement so that the shelf finally shined in its beauty and harmony that was never imagined before. You nailed it! You created a tiny island of order in the vast ocean of chaos. You got it right.

I think that is the feeling artists constantly seek in their works. And it takes hard work to get there. Everything else that occupies critics so much is just not relevant.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.”

Oscar Wilde

So here it is, the last part. After discussing fear we turn to the final obstacle that is on the way of reaching our full creative potential. You are not going to like it. It is:

Satisfaction with the Obvious
Or in short: laziness! People are plain lazy! I believe laziness in creativity comes in three stages and we'll deal with each separately:

- Satisfaction with the Obvious (this sounds so good I took it as a general title, sry)
- Lack of Homework
- Lack of Persistency

Satisfaction with the Obvious¹
Huh, how to begin with this? Well, in a nutshell: everything that has a value in life doesn't come easy, does it? I mean, it takes some time and work! It takes some time and work to understand Coltrane or Beethoven, but after that, you are more than well rewarded. Many people go for Lady Gaga (or equivalent, don't pick up on me) whose tunes are so obvious that one can easily remember them after the first listening. There is nothing sublime in it, something that would wait for you on your second, third or 100th listening. Nothing. Most people are satisfied with that kind of obvious!

And once you'll start being aware of this phenomena you'll see it everywhere. People, as consumers and creators of the culture, quickly quit. They don't dig in for the solutions that are not so obvious. But it is precisely those that are often the most valuable. You just have to go the extra mile!

I see this in my classes. When I try to inspire some creative work, most students quit searching for solutions the minute they get their first or second idea. And it is often that I am no better myself. It is only at my most motivated point that I dig deeper to find the most valuable ones. For one thing, the first ideas, the obvious ones, are usually the ones that are already done somewhere so they are not novel at all (hence, they are not really creative, are they?) and beside that they are most likely be the ones that I am most comfortable executing. Usually they pose the least amount of risk (precisely because they are already executed somewhere with known outcome). The deep ideas are usually counterintuitive and highly risky. But those are the revolutionary ones! Practically every invention, from a lightbulb to an iPhone was at its creation very counterintuitive. So is the best music, like Beethoven's Grosse fuge which went against everything people recognized as music at its time. Yet it is more musical than almost anything else created in the history, but you realize that only after a couple dozen times you listen it. At first it is very demanding, but then it is very rewarding piece.

The reasons for this are of course complex (like everything we discuss here). On one side it is perhaps a natural disposition of the brain to spare energy once an acceptable solution is found. Secondly; our brain uses memories of past events to envision future so it is quite natural that most people can't envision any other future than a mashup of what has already happened. This is a huge handicap for creativity and another evolutionary advantage that backfires (envisioning the future on the basis of past events helps survive, no doubt). See Jeff Hawkins for more on that.

The other reason was already mentioned before; the incredible passivity of the 20th century. Trough out the history of man kind people had to entertain themselves. In order to have some fun they had to tell stories, sing, act, dance or draw for them selves. Of course some were better than the others, but I believe all of them did at least something. This was amateur culture at its best. In the 20th century technological inventions allowed mass distribution of sounds and pictures. Unfortunately those inventions were not developed enough to allow interactive participation of the audience. The audience became evermore passive, while on other side professional entertainers got the largest stage in the world: the whole planet! Why would I listen my father while Sinatra sings so much better! Why don't we all just sit down on our couch and laugh at Letterman's jokes? 20th century is a century of cultural passivity which has no precedence in human history. So in hunger for bigger and bigger audience (=ratings), any reasonable TV station has to adopt measures that fit the largest crowds, which means doing productions that are easy to grasp. People are educated into the obvious and quickly gain notion that everything in this world should be this way. So when they go to a modern gallery or when they see some art photography, they are lead to believe, that this kind of culture is obvious too. They couldn't be more mistaken. The best creative works are anything but obvious. They are fruits of the deepest creative thoughts and in order to understand them one should take time and dive into those depths.

Of course, sometimes even renowned art is shallow and sometimes what appears to be deep on the surface is actually empty on the inside. It happens. Even people who are trained in arts or sciences are often mislead by the appearance. One such example could IMHO be the famous Drake's equation which on surface looks like hardcore science (it is math, right), but when one inspects it closely, one can find out that it is actually bullshit. Almost all of the factors in the equation are arbitrary and unknown. So the 'equation' can easily yield a huge number of different results (from 0 to gazillion) which are almost equally probable. Is that equation solving anything? Of course not. It just mimics science by appearance in a form of an equation. At best is just an other way of saying: we don't have a clue! But we are off the track now. I am sure there are similar examples of phoniness in art too: things that just look like real art on the outside but hold nothing valuable inside. It happens. My point is that you can't really tell if you don't dig into it. You can't just glance at a painting in the gallery and say "This is nothing." You can't!

In this context an other thing should be mentioned: critical thought! People often fall in love with their ideas and their work, but only those who can maintain a safe distance can produce really good stuff. "You have to be routhless!" William Allard told me in an interview. Not everything you produce is good, in fact, most of it isn't. Scrutiny is perhaps the most overlooked aspect of creativity, but it is critical for any kind of creative work. The most obvious example would be photography; photographers return from assignments with thousands of photographs, but only 10 can make it into print. Which 10? A movie director might have a dozen different dialogue versions for each scene, but how to pick ones that really play well? I spoke on taste already, and I also noted how to recognize really a mature performance, so I will not repeat that here. It suffices to say that critical judgement and developed taste is an important aspect of every creative process. One should be in a constant zig-zag between non-judgemental playfulness and harsh self-criticism. When one is in the zone (i.e. having an almost spiritual creative experience of totally focused mind) those two modes either merge or totally disappear - it is hard to tell since this is such a delirium that it has rules of its own. Needles to say, being in the zone is the best creative state of mind and we should do everything we can to make it happen. More about that in a minute.

Lack of homework
I don't know whether this should be before or after the previous argument about being satisfied with the obvious, but in a way it doesn't even matter. I believe every creative act needs some sort of theoretical (or practical) background. The only way to invent something (without a huge amount of luck) is to study all of the available knowledge that existed before you on that subject. You can't push the whole field of physics forward without studying all of the physics that is already known. You can't invent a new way of storing liquids without studying all of the ways we store liquids today. You can't! It is absolutely necessary to study every detail of every thing you can find in order to find flaws and imperfections which are opportunities for improvement or in the best possible case; the reinvention. In a case when there is simply no solution available, you must study the problem so much more. Only then you may count on being lucky. The discovery of Penicillin is often regarded as an accidental discovery, but in my eyes is anything but that. It didn't happen to just anyone. It happened to Alexander Fleming, a man who invested so much into science! Discovery of comets, stars or fossils are most often described as the same kind of "lucky accidents", but just think if that could happen to you rather than to a person who studies the sky or the bedrock 24/7. I believe not. They know exactly what they are looking for! Similar kinds of accidents can happen in art too (see this blog post about it). Again it is not what happens, it is about you recognizing a true value in it. You can recognize that only if you are ready, only if you did your homework! Many people don't!

Lack of Persistency
Creativity is often confused with rich imagination. Sometimes you find these weirdly looking self-proclaimed artists who wouldn't stop telling you how creative they are. They go on about their 'ideas' and how nobody understands them. Those people may have rich imagination, but creativity involves an act of creating something tangible; an invention, a painting, a dance, a piece of music, an article, a new economic theory... something! And that takes work!
The amount of time you actually feel inspired and illuminated is very short in comparison to the amount of time you spend crafting this thing into its final form. Just to give you a trivial example; I had an idea for this series of articles written down in 5 minutes during a breakfast one morning (I must have had too much tea, I was quite hyper that time) and I think I had more or less everything written down in my head at the time. But it took me more than three weeks to actually execute it, no matter how good or bad the actual result really is. Most of the time went for trivial typing, spell-checking, double checking the facts and stuff like that. Nothing typically creative at all - just dull and boring work. But that is nothing compared to Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. You think that ceiling painted itself? I am not sure we can even begin to imagine the impossible conditions under which the great genius spent 4 (four!) years of his life simply executing his idea. Even though the whole idea is brilliant, the majority of the work lies in trivial craft of painting. The first part of creativity (getting an idea) might be about letting it go and be as unconditioned as possible, but creativity is also about holding on to it. It is about not quiting when the work becomes dull and borring. It is about not quitting when the time of crisis and self-doubt erodes your will. Self doubt will almost always come if you are working with novel and untested ideas. We discussed that in the previous part of this series (I really like the way how everything is coming together).

The reason why people don't do their homework and why they lack the will to carry on is in my opinion in lack of passion. When people are blindly passionate about some problem or activity, they don't care about "what if they're wrong" or "what will people think." That fear is gone like the laziness is gone too. They simply push forward like a bulldozer. They don't care much if it is possible or not, they don't care if people are telling them how stupid they are, they don't care if they haven't eaten for hours or haven't slept for days... they just don't care!

How to bring people to that passionate inspired state of mind? How to fall in the zone? It helps a lot to be in your element. You must do what you love to do! Being in an element is fun! You are playful which, again, doesn't mean you are careless, it simply means you take enjoyable risks! And secondly; you must have an inspired figure to look up to. It could be an idol from television (not everything about television is bad, ok) or even better, a person from your own place - a really good teacher, mentor, athlete, somebody who also loves his work and shares this positive energy with others. An inspirational person can become only someone who is inspired him-herself.

Does the school play a vital role here? Mostly no, but sometimes yes. Speaking abstractly - in most schools only three kinds of mental capacities are fully exercised; math (logic), languages and memory. Even these are far to abstract and are not practised on the applied level. Studying languages in (most) school is like learning to swim by performing swimming moves on dry ground. What about jumping into the water, dammit!? Schools offer far too narrow curriculum for kids to test their talents. The hierarchical structure reveals that applied arts or dance are undervalued. This is a legacy of the 19th century in which schools were popularized to educate the working class. A good factory worker should know some basic algebra and have some writing/reading skills. Hence math and languages are still at the top of importance list of every school. Math is something that is forced upon as common knowledge, something that we all have capacity to learn, while at the same time, art or music is denied on the basis of the required talent. Just how stupid is that? You need a talent for music, but you don't need it for math?! This curriculum is totally out of balance, it has nothing to do with our real mental capacities and worst of all, it denies people their talents... Many very bright people who don't happen to be interested or gifted with those few skills that school rewards, can live their whole life thinking they are stupid and untalented. I believe this is simply unacceptable for the 21st century. True, in 19h century you couldn't have make a living being a dancer, but that is no longer the case now, at least not in developed countries (forget Slovenia... see part 3 for that). Of course, we all need some math, we all need some language skills, but we also need some music, some art, some dance, some photography or movies... The thing is in proper balance which should also be individually based, and proper execution which should be based on practical application. And this is just the beginning... Again, this is not an article about education.

Luckily we at least have a few inspired teachers, mentors and public heroes who can overcome these obstacles and fire up new generations of students. When Appollo program was running MIT didn't have any problems with not having enough students. At the same time we unfortunatelly have bored and frustrated teachers who do so much damage that it would be better if they hadn't thought at all. Perhaps I am exaggerating, but maybe you are better off having no math at all than hating math for the rest of your life just because the person who was teaching you, hated math (and his life) more than anything in the world. Don't you think?

But let us rather finish with good news. We DO have inspired teachers, mentors and public figures, we DO have people who are aware of how broken our education system is and we DO have people who work hard to make it better. And with the advent of the internet and Web 2.0 there is an overabundance of creativity everywhere. People stood up from their 20th century couches, picked up cameras, pens, guitars, brushes (etc) and the results are here. The new generation cares less about mass media (politics, entertainment...) and cares more about their own creativity. There would be no Flickr, DeviantArt or Vimeo without them. Of course, not all of what is uploaded is creative in the most meaningful sense, but some of it is! Give me one good reason why not be optimistic about it!


Epilogue
First of all - if you came to this point - thank you for reading. To be completely honest, I didn't write it for you. I wrote it (as almost everything on this blog lately) for myself. I write these things as preparation for articles, lectures or debates. You can see it as a kind of public notebook if you will. But anyways, thank you.

This series can be viewed in two ways. The way it is written is a list of things that can go wrong when we try to reach our creative potential. But it can also be understood in an other way in which it can help you understand just how many small things have to go right in order to get productive geniuses on the level of Tesla, Picasso, Bill Gates... Of course, not everything can be controlled. There are so many arbitrary and random factors that shape our life and work together that it is impossible, despite all that was written, to predict where one will end up in life. Life is full of randomness which we don't understand. We know a little bit about certain trends that happen, but that is all. Just as we know what happens to a certain amount of gas when we raise temperature for 10K, we have a small clue about social and economic trends, but just as we can't predict the movement of a single molecule in that gas so we can't predict a life of a person or stock market. So please, try to read and understand this with a grain of salt. Try to understand life and creativity on the basis that you don't understand it fully or even at all. I believe this is a mature place to start.

Basic references:
Hawkins, J., (2004), On Intelligence, New York, Holt Paperbacks
Robinson, K. et all, (1982), The Arts in Schools, London, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Robinson, K., (2001), Out of Our Minds - Learning to be creative, London, Capstone
Robinson, K., (2009), The Element - How finding your passion changes everything, New York, Viking Penguin
Lessig, L., (2004), Free culture - How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity, New York, Penguin (Free PDF)
Lessig, L. (2007): TED Talk
Robinson, K. (2006): TED talk 1
Robinson, K. (2010): TED talk 2
Drori, J., (2007): TED talk

Footnotes
¹ Many smart people often say that the most difficult things to grasp are usually the most obvious ones. Things that are the most difficult to see are usually the ones that are before your eyes. There is some truth to that. But that is a different kind of 'obvious,' it is a 'higher level of obvious'... I hope it is clear I am not talking about that, but I have to put this note here in order to avoid any misinterpretations.

Part 1 Part 3 Part 4

In the first part of this series I discussed the noise that is created by the media outlets which clutters and occupies our minds so that we simply cannot think creatively. But there are other problems too. The next in line is:

The Lack of Imagination
Imagination is the core engine of creativity and many people simply lack that. Imagination simply means seeing with your mind's eye what has not been materialized yet. At least not that you know of it. There are IMHO two basic reasons why people don't develop/carry this ability in adult age:

1- they lack proper genes for their brain to be powerful enough (I don't believe this could be true for such a large amount of people),
2- they had it too easy in life.

Since the first reason is completely arbitrary and hard to prove (then again, I am not a geneticist), I shall not discuss it.

But what about the second? Again, I might be speaking from my gut, but I came to believe that imagination develops when there is a certain delay between a wish and its fulfillment. If that time is too long then frustrations and its suppression can occur, but that is an other subject.

Remember your childhood; you want a new toy so badly it almost hurts. But your parents don't buy it right away, so you'll have to wait till Christmas or your birthday. During that time you start imagining how sweet would it be to get that thing and everything you could do with it. You can see yourself playing with it, sharing it with friends, and so on... This is how your imagination was born! If you have parents that fulfilled your wishes instantly, it is very likely you will not develop imaginative powers of the brain. Again, this is from the gut, but in my experience as a mentor, spoiled kids tend to have more difficulty understanding fairytales, poems or even visual art. They also produce less (and lesser quality) of their own works. It is not that they are stupid or unknowledgable, they simply lack imagination. And patience! How could anything be created without patience!? (another product of non-fulfilled wish)

Then you go to school and school fails even harder than some parents at developing children's imagination. Almost every education system in the world is what Lawrence Lessig would call a Read-Only (RO) system. That is a centralized system at which one person broadcasts his knowledge or skills, while a myriad of other are in a role of completely passive receivers, who have to repeat whatever was told or demonstrated. This system has no respect for individual intellect or personal creativity. Most classes are organized in a way that knowledge is brought to you readily on a tray. You don't have to work for it. It is just there for you to consume it. It often feels like the system thinks I am so stupid, that I can't find that knowledge myself. Only the most inspired teachers have the power to overcome this built-in flaw and make their classes a Read-Write (RW) class, at which students equally participate in creation of the lesson, and where their individual contributions (ideas) are crucial for the class. But those are rare exceptions.

Imagine now, if you will, a different kind of class. It is a class at which knowledge is acquired by hands-on experimenting and (field) research. A class where you have to work to get your answers. The knowledge doesn't come right away, you have to wait and search for it, and while you're at it, you imagination is already working out the possible solutions for your problem. It might take a little more time, but the understanding you get is far deeper and the knowledge more real. It is not just words you memorize from a book, it is The Knowledge. This kind of teaching respects learner's intellect. It is as if it's been sublimely said: "I know you are a smart person. I believe you can find answers yourself and you don't need me to bring them to you." It is a lot easier to be motivated after such compliment. And imagine a class at which testing is done in a way that is not humiliating. Questions are completely different. One can get a question like;

"From where does a tree get all the stuff it needs to grow?"

If you want to answer that, you have to know really a lot about trees, but not just that; you must also connect together different domains of knowledge, like biology, chemistry, geology, meteorology, math... Everything has to fall into place for you to answer that the tree is made mostly of carbon and that carbon doesn't come from the ground (like the majority would answer), but from the air with a process called photosynthesis. You didn't see that one coming, did you! Photosynthesis is how a tree makes wood! If it really came from the ground there would be a large hole under every tree. A tree wants to grow up to reach even more sunlight and dominate the space (evolutionary explainable). Oxygen is just a side product. But you didn't learn that in school, because you were too occupied with memorizing the exact word order of the proper definition of photosynthesis, which goes as followed:

"Photosynthesis (from the Greek φώτο- [photo-], "light," and σύνθεσις [synthesis], "putting together", "composition") is a process that converts carbon dioxide into organic compounds, especially sugars, using the energy from sunlight.Photosynthesis occurs in plants, algae, and many species of bacteria, but not in archaea ..." (source)

It is a scientifically correct definition, but it completely blurs the point. It is a wood making process! Of course, memorizing and repeating that dull definition will rob you of the joy that is thinking. I assume you had a great time pondering the question "From where does a tree get all the stuff it needs to grow?" but not such a great time when you had to memorize in school. People simply love to think, they love to use their imagination, but the schools will just not give you enough opportunities to use your brain in a way that it was built for and we are lucky to have that many creative people who retain this capacity into their adult life. For the most people, by the time they finish school, they are just a machine to store and reproduce a few facts and some basic skills (language and some math). If people are creative, they are creative despite of-, not because of the schools.

The schools are tiring and stressful, but that shouldn't be confused with intellectually hard. The schools are far to easy. Thinking is fun, but there is almost no thinking and imagining done in schools.¹ This kind of teaching is actually an insult for one's intelligence. No wonder kids rebel! Again: there is no delay between a wish and its fulfillment that is needed to spur imagination. Hence, for the most of the people, schools are boring and no fun at all! The unnatural way of learning and testing is a cause of a lot of anxiety. There is something very wrong with that. The majority of people doesn't see it that way (they assume this is the nature of things, that it cannot be done any other way...), but I simply find it problematic. Give me one good reason why should the school be stressful! Why in the world should 10-year-olds have cramps in their stomach every morning? Why do we torture our kids like that? Schools could be so much fun, full of adventure and exploration, just like Naional Geographic, but in real life! We just have to shift our logic from RO to RW and develop respect for their young but huge intellects.

In both cases (parenting and teaching) the reasons for not giving a child enough time to develop imagination could be completely benevolent and even noble. Parents want their children to have things they couldn't have had. And many people go into teaching because they want to share knowledge and spare misconceptions they had themselves. They want to give kids the right answers straight away so that they wouldn't waste time on intellectual dead ends. That is a noble cause indeed, but by doing it too much they rob young people of the joy that is exploration (and imagination).

After school, your passive intellectual life, where information is only consumed (not even repeated anymore) continues in front of the TV set and other classic media.² We covered that already. 20th century is perhaps the only century in human history, where the predominant culture was of the RO kind. A big, centralized industry of music, movies, television, radio and publishing was feeding hungry consumers. Why wouldn't they consume; professionals in Hollywood are much better than the local theater. But there is a good news; with the dawn of the internet our creative potential is back at work. Just look at the Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, blogs and everything that is created. We are back to Read-Write. We all participate in making the cultural landscape. And that fuels my imagination!


Basic references:
Hawkins, J., (2004), On Intelligence, New York, Holt Paperbacks
Robinson, K. et all, (1982), The Arts in Schools, London, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Robinson, K., (2001), Out of Our Minds - Learning to be creative, London, Capstone
Robinson, K., (2009), The Element - How finding your passion changes everything, New York, Viking Penguin
Lessig, L., (2004), Free culture - How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity, New York, Penguin (Free PDF)
Lessig, L. (2007): TED Talk
Robinson, K. (2006): TED talk 1
Robinson, K. (2010): TED talk 2
Drori, J., (2007): TED talk

And if you want to so see how a good RW kind of class looks like, see this.

Footnotes:
¹ - We should also note, that the school curriculum is far to narrow to cover all of the interests and talents that children might have. Not just that; it is completely unbalanced. Languages and math are dominant subjects everywhere you go while arts and certain sciences suffer from the lack of attention. As Ken Robinson puts it, a lot of people go trough their lives thinking they don't have any talent at all. They don't enjoy what they do in life, they just do their jobs and wait for the weekend. We are not all born just for math, languages and encyclopedic learning. We are much more than that! I spilled a lot of ink on that subject, I am aware of the problem, but it is an education-specific subject, so I decided not to write about it in this context.

²- One more thing. When you talk about schools and media in this tone, you can quickly pass the line and end up on the side of conspiracy 'theories'. It is a very thin line indeed! The point at which conspiracy simply fails is that it assumes that this system is put up and maintained by intelligent design of the elite. Now this is a kind of a compliment, don't you think? I simply don't believe they are that smart. Nobody is. There is simply too much data and too many arbitrary factors for anyone to manipulate with. Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science will show you that even with the simplest of rules a great randomness can occur. Even supercomputers can't predict weather for more than 3 days ahead, not to mention the whole society. I would also strongly suggest reading some game theory on this subject. It will show how even if every involved member of the society is trying for the best, the whole system can go totally down. Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene will force you to make the same conclusion.

"There are no accidental masterpieces in painting, but there are accidental masterpieces in photography." - Chuck Close (in The Genius of Photography documentary)

There are no accidentally good paintings, but there are accidentally good photographs for sure. It often happens that I stumble upon some of them on facebooks, flickr or even in my mum's old family album. I find an amateur photograph and it is simply perfect. Everything is as it should be; the light, composition, subjects, colors, story, emotion, atmosphere... everything. I guess the medium of photography is so easy to master that these things can occur; amateurs instinctively produce quality that professionals work years to achieve. Of course, with amateurs these accidents are only a bright exception, whilst with professionals they are a rule made by design (talent + hard work). No problems so far.

The problems arise when we have to evaluate these masterpieces. Should they be put in the same basket as masterpieces that are produced by skilled professionals? Many would say no; it is a matter of luck. But I hesitate; luck or no luck, the picture itself is what matters at the end. It is not an easy step (especially not for a photographer), but one should learn to accept and respect accidental masterpieces and enjoy their qualities. This should go not only for amateur accidental masterpieces but also for accidentally good photographs that professionals do at their work. The process of recognizing the quality (or selection) is a severely underrated step in creative process. Especially in photography it is crucial to understand that a good exhibition can be made or killed at this stage. Start with 3000 photos, select 300, and from those the final 30 for an exhibition or a book. I know that many times photographers would fight their better judgment and not include a good photo in, just because a significant amount of luck was present at its creation. It seems like it rivals their talent and skill. But I believe you shouldn't fight that emotion and let the "lucky" one into the selection, simply because your talent and skills are already at work when you are selecting! It is the same talent that is taking those decisions (light, angle, expression...) on the field while taking the photos, or in the studio while making a selection. The same talent! Picasso was once doing a simple paper sculptures; he would simply take a piece of paper and tore it into parts and pieces. How could this be art if it is governed by chance? Of course it is, because not every piece made Picasso satisfied. Even though his papers were torn with a huge amount of randomness, his artistic genius was able to recognize qualities in some that others simply didn't have. It is about that artistic recognition, and not necessarily about the process of making the piece itself.

Therefore it is not surprising that it is often the professionals, and not the amateurs, who recognize those accidental works for what they are. But certain conditions have to be met; one is honesty. You just have to accept the fact that sometimes instincts and pure luck can result into something that is usually achieved only by years of hard work and study. Just don't fight it!

People tend to assert certain names to certain things and find relations among them. Usually we call those names categories. For example; you may have heard of classical music, rap, pop, rock... or landscape photography, portraiture, fashion, sports... or parts of the brain like cortex, cerebellum, thalamus...

This is all OK, but the problem is, that most of the people take those categories too seriously or too literally. There is no distinct border between classical or rock music because those two categories of the same category of art (again, category) share many similarities and even common grounds. Of course, they have some differences, but where would you draw the line??? These labels are here not because they would represent some real categories, they are here just to help us communicate and they serve well as long as we keep in mind that things are a lot more organic and complex in reality.

The same goes for every other kind of category; categories in art, categories in tools even categories in different types of personalities, modes of thinking, creativity processes and so on!

Even experts (especially psychologists have this tendency) like to have things sorted out in drawers; keep a name for every thing that occurs. But the life is complex and organic; people can't just fit in a drawer because much like rock and classical music, there is no distinct line between musical or graphical kind of creativity. Again; these words are here just to help us understand each other and do not represent real (=physical) differences in direct and literal terms as many would have liked. This would have given a lot of consolation for many who would like to think that they have figured the world out. But they haven't. In fact they are often using fancy words to cover up their infantile understanding.

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Perhaps it has to do with survival; people who have their experiences sorted out are in better position to survive (tigers are dangerous, olives are good, apples are healthy...), but in modern society we should know better than that. We should understand that the underlying nature of the world is a lot more astonishing than we could even begin to understand and that the words we come up with to describe it may represent only a selected few of its surface properties.

So yes; use "categories" but only to the extent where you are still aware of the fact that this are just words, made up by humans and do not necessarily reflect the actual nature of things.


Image by striatic

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Acording to E.H.Gombrich, there are three basic factors that shape our experience of certain piece of art: mental setting, context and the piece od art itself. Mental setting would be your mood in which you aproach the subject or the expectation of it. It is clear that there is a difference if you enter the galery in a jolly or perhaps nervous mood. But what most of the people tend to neglect is the context. And not just for art, but for any given situation in life. There is a huge difference if you meet someone for the first time either in a library or in discotheque. In first case you might remember him/her as a nerd, in the second as a party animal. This may influence your relationship for quite a long time

Maybe this is the reason I don't generally buy food on my trips. A few weeks ago I came back from Provence (France) which is home of many delicious types of cheese. I must admit I am a bit of a cheese maniac, but instead of bringing tons of cheese home, I rather enjoyed it there. I know that THE SAME cheese just wouldn't be the same. Because it was not just the cheese, but the whole context in which it was served (and eaten) that made the whole experience so great and bringing home a piece of carbon-based molecules wouldn't be enough (and my money would go to waste).

The context (or better, the lack of it) is the reason why it is almost impossible to recognize a lady that sells you bread when meeting on the street (outside the usual context) and why people who fall in love on vacation often can't continue their romance when they get back home (the context changes). It is also why you might consider summer romances as "unreal" - because they are not part of your predominant context of life!

There are many more cases where context is the defining factor of our experience and we should take that into our account before we judge too quickly. Was really the person so anoying or was just your mental setting wrong? Or was it the context (maybe a boring meeting) which bothered you? Is a picture bad or is it because you saw it in a cheap magazine? Was (on the other hand) the song really that great or is it just because your favorite band played it? Think about it!