about art and creativity

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

Reflecting on this email from a Sublime believer:

Consuming media has become a massive time-suck for humankind. Only decades ago, the average person had one source of information, if any — the newspaper. Journalists chronicled happenings relevant to their community. And that was it. Someone got married, someone is selling their house, someone died,

The challenge is to structure one’s workflow in a way that insight and new ideas can become the driving forces that push us forward. We do not want to make ourselves dependent on a plan that is threatened by the unexpected, like a new idea, discovery – or insight.

Sönke Ahrens • How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers

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

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

The 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

Creative excellence is ineffable. When you see something that resonates, you’ll know — it will hold a mysterious, irrational power over you. That's as close to a definition as I can get: Something that moves me. It can come from anywhere; a weird combination of words, a stupid joke, the bright sound of a French horn, the way a piece of wood

“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