about art and creativity
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) knew how to appropriate most ardently. The renowned artist once said, “It’s hard for me to think of artists who weren’t influential on me because I’m such a blatant thief.”
Kate Mothes • Wayne Thiebaud's Passion for Art History Shines in 'Art Comes from Art'
Wayne Thiebaud on Art
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
My product won’t write sentences for you. The slow process of writing is what clarifies thought, shapes identity, and cultivates a lens to the world. Writing is the whole point; it isn’t a chore to optimize, it’s an infinite game.
Michael Dean • Mega-Update
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
The psychology of the flow state
If you consider yourself a technologist, here’s your imperative: build things that are unabashedly, beautifully tangled into all else in life — people and relationships, politics, emotion and pain, understanding or the lack thereof, being alone, being together, homesickness, adventure, victory, loss. Build things that come alive, and drag... See more
Create things that come alive
A tradeoff occurs every time you get feedback. You become slightly more mainstream, slightly more aligned with the zeitgeist. You become marginally more of an exploiter than an explorer , standing on the shoulders of the giants who conceived the paradigm you’re striving to build upon. This is very effective when you want to align your work with... See more
Leber • The Feedback Tradeoff
“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.
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