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
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
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
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
“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 moreFor 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
Creativity happens at the intersection of three elements: the individual with the idea, the domain in which that idea operates, and the field that recognizes and values the contribution.
Ashish Bhatia • The artifact isn't the art: Rethinking creativity in the age of AI
“All jokes aside, if you don’t fuck around, you’ll never actually find out.”