about art and creativity
For all its good intentions, art that tries to minister to its audience by showcasing moral aspirants and paragons or the abject victims of political oppression produces smug, tiresome works that are failures both as art and as agitprop. Artists and critics—their laurel bearers—should take heed.
Anastasia Berg • On the Aesthetic Turn | The Point Magazine
art is the medium to convey a feeling that has yet to be put into words. ‘Art is the relief from the duty of coherence,’ says Dr. Joost Vervoort, Associate Professor of Transformative Imagination at the Copernicus Institute of Sus- tainable Development, paraphrasing John Law
“For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly.
... See moreWhen I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything... See more
James Somers • More People Should Write
The fear of developing “bad” taste, or taste that diverges from the mainstream, can paralyse creatives, stifling their creative growth and leading them to try to borrow or buy taste through bootcamps, curated inspiration documents or sheer are.na-driven osmosis.
Elizabeth Goodspeed on the Importance of Taste – And How to Acquire It
many people “do not want to think critically about the things they consume” and feel that “if they absorb any criticism about the things they consume it will magically ruin their enjoyment of them.” When we chatted about the role of criticism on a (fun, lightly gossipy) video call this month, she added that saying a piece of art is bad isn’t saying... See more
“I picked a bad time to become a critic” – Elizabeth Goodspeed on the collapse of design critique
“At the same time, art cannot be understood in terms of purpose. As the sculptor Charles Ray has said, art is “for absolutely nothing.” To make, or experience, art is to enter a kind of free zone; it slows us down, places us in some epistemological estuary, takes us into the wild. We make art from our flaws, fragilities, perversities, from our need
... See moreThe purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline … but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.
– Glenn Gould
– Glenn Gould