What Is Art For? - Lewis Hyde - Profile - NYTimes.com
Tags: art, creativity, society, copy_left, culture, literature, poetry, education, school, anthropology, creative_commons, shakespeare, emerson on 2008-11-17 -All Annotations (10) -About
more fromwww.nytimes.com
-
For the Copy Left, as for Hyde, the last 20 years have witnessed a corporate “land grab” of information — often in the guise of protecting the work of individual artists — that has put a stranglehold on creativity, in increasingly bizarre ways.
-
Illich, an Austrian priest-cum-social-critic who drew wide public attention for his book “Deschooling Society” (1971) — a polemic against modern public education.
-
Gift economies, as Mauss defines them, are marked by circulation and connectivity: goods have value only insofar as they are treated as gifts, and gifts can remain gifts only if they are continually given away. This results in a kind of engine of community cohesion, in which objects create social, psychological, emotional and spiritual bonds as they pass from hand to hand.
-
For centuries people have been speaking of talent and inspiration as gifts; Hyde’s basic argument was that this language must extend to the products of talent and inspiration too. Unlike a commodity, whose value begins to decline the moment it changes hands, an artwork gains in value from the act of being circulated—published, shown, written about, passed from generation to generation — from being, at its core, an offering.
-
C.T.E.A. was not only unfortunate but also unconstitutional. For Hyde, as for many legal and political scholars, the C.T.E.A. (the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” to its detractors) represents a blatant abrogation of the purpose of intellectual-property law. As he sets out to show in his book, copyright was enshrined in the Constitution for civic rather than commercial purposes. For the founders, intellectual property was a great privilege; copyrights and patents were primarily meant to serve, in Madison’s words, as “encouragements to literary works and ingenious discoveries.” By extending copyright retroactively, Hyde told me, the C.T.E.A. negated the logic of incentive: Mickey Mouse can’t be invented twice.
-
“All of the C.C. licenses use the lever of the law,” he said. “They have the assumption of private ownership behind them. So Lessig, in a certain sense, is confining himself to one slice of this stuff, which is not as capacious as a true commons would be.”
-
“Shakespeare’s plays,” he writes, “will never collapse, no matter how many people read them — and such commons therefore serve as a kind of limiting case for the argument that the market will serve us well in every sphere of life.”
-
There’s a line of Emerson’s from ‘Self-Reliance,’ ” Hyde told me one day in his office, “where he says of Benjamin Franklin: ‘Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin? Every great man is a unique.’ Well, it’s crazy! There’s a long list of masters who taught Franklin! And yet the Emersonian song is the one that sticks in everyone’s head.”
-
The point of all this is not to prove that Franklin wasn’t a genius but to show that his genius didn’t burst out of thin air. “It takes a capacious mind to play host to … others and to find new ways to combine what they have to offer,” Hyde writes, “but not a mind for whom there are no masters, not a ‘unique.’ Quite the opposite — this is a mind willing to be taught, willing to be inhabited, willing to labor in the cultural commons.”
-
In other words, “Walden,” the premier document of American individualism, was in a sense born out of the generosity of the American prophet of self-reliance.
The art of competitiveness | The San Diego Union-Tribune
In his book, “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future,” Daniel Pink makes the case that we have entered the Conceptual Age and that certain right-brain skills are essential to economic success
Tags: economy, technology, industry, education, design, culture, art, brain, emotion, intelligence, creativity, book_review on 2008-10-31 -All Annotations (1) -About
more fromwww.signonsandiego.com
-
To survive and prosper in the Conceptual Age, Pink identifies a set of aptitudes – including design, pattern recognition and empathy – that are considered right-brain skills. (Although Pink provides basic neurological background, he primarily uses the brain's geography metaphorically to organize and present his ideas.) The good news is that these right-brain skills can be learned and honed, and participation in the arts supports this essential learning.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow | Video on TED.com
not a great speaker, sounds like a bunch of hooey, but
Tags: psychology, creativity, video on 2008-10-23 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.ted.com
Annals of Culture: Late Bloomers: Malcolm Gladwell
Late bloomers’ stories are invariably love stories, and this may be why we have such difficulty with them. We’d like to think that mundane matters like loyalty, steadfastness, and the willingness to keep writing checks to support what looks like failure have nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius. But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.
Tags: creativity, prodigy, art, painting, writing, fiction, interview on 2008-10-14 and saved by7 people -All Annotations (15) -About
more fromwww.newyorker.com
-
they typically believe that learning is a more important goal than making finished paintings. Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability to achieve their goal.
-
An experimental innovator would go back to Haiti thirty times. That’s how that kind of mind figures out what it wants to do. When Cézanne was painting a portrait of the critic Gustave Geffroy, he made him endure eighty sittings, over three months, before announcing the project a failure. (The result is one of that string of masterpieces in the Musée d’Orsay.) When Cézanne painted his dealer, Ambrose Vollard, he made Vollard arrive at eight in the morning and sit on a rickety platform until eleven-thirty, without a break, on a hundred and fifty occasions—before abandoning the portrait. He would paint a scene, then repaint it, then paint it again. He was notorious for slashing his canvases to pieces in fits of frustration.
-
Mark Twain was the same way. Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin Rogers on Twain’s trial-and-error method: “His routine procedure seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again.” Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on “Huckleberry Finn” so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.
-
“More happily endowed and more integral personalities have been able to express themselves harmoniously from the very first. But such rich, complex, and conflicting natures as Cézanne’s require a long period of fermentation.” Cézanne was trying something so elusive that he couldn’t master it until he’d spent decades practicing.
-
If you read “Everything Is Illuminated,” you end up with the same feeling you get when you read “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara”—the sense of transport you experience when a work of literature draws you into its own world. Both are works of art. It’s just that, as artists, Fountain and Foer could not be less alike. Fountain went to Haiti thirty times. Foer went to Trachimbrod just once. “I mean, it was nothing,” Foer said. “I had absolutely no experience there at all. It was just a springboard for my book. It was like an empty swimming pool that had to be filled up.” Total time spent getting inspiration for his novel: three days.
B
-
Sharie was Ben’s wife. But she was also—to borrow a term from long ago—his patron. That word has a condescending edge to it today, because we think it far more appropriate for artists (and everyone else for that matter) to be supported by the marketplace. But the marketplace works only for people like Jonathan Safran Foer, whose art emerges, fully realized, at the beginning of their career, or Picasso,
-
But for Zola, Cézanne would have remained an unhappy banker’s son in Provence; but for Pissarro, he would never have learned how to paint; but for Vollard (at the urging of Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, and Monet), his canvases would have rotted away in some attic; and, but for his father, Cézanne’s long apprenticeship would have been a financial impossibility. That is an extraordinary list of patrons.
Musicians Use Both Sides Of Their Brains More Frequently Than Average People
sample size, oxygen use=brain activity, etc.
Tags: music, brain, science_is_a_method, research, creativity on 2008-10-09 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (13) -About
more fromwww.sciencedaily.com
-
In the first experiment, the researchers showed the research subjects a variety of household objects and asked them to make up new functions for them, and also gave them a written word association test. The musicians gave more correct responses than non-musicians on the word association test, which the researchers believe may be attributed to enhanced verbal ability among musicians. The musicians also suggested more novel uses for the household objects than their non-musical counterparts.
-
a brain scanning technique called near-infrared spectroscopy, or NIRS. NIRS measures changes in blood oxygenation in the cortex while an individual is performing a cognitive task.
"When we measured subjects' prefrontal cortical activity while completing the alternate uses task, we found that trained musicians had greater activity in both sides of their frontal lobes.
A List Apart: Articles: Look at it Another Way
Tags: creativity, model, user_interface, design on 2008-09-11 and saved by9 people -All Annotations (7) -About
more fromwww.alistapart.com
-
Stop thinking of them as a “user” of the thing you provide. Think about how and why they accomplish what they want to get done, not how or why they might use your stuff.
-
Rather than looking for differences in how segments use your product, look for differences between the beliefs and behaviors of these segments in real life.
-
Everybody out of the pool!
-
By getting rid of the self-limiting branching topics that assume there are no mysteries, you train reps to extract information through conversation, and how to use the internal company knowledgebase.
-
Mental models frequently fall prey to our own assumptions and understanding of a particular field. When creating one, turn off your internal problem-solver and just listen to people. Allow patterns of behavior and motivation to reveal themselves to you. Work from the bottom up, rather than designating several behavior areas and trying to fit people’s actions into them.
Michael Nielsen » The Future of Science
Tags: open_source, open_science, science, academia, publishing, innovation, creativity, information, wikipedia on 2008-08-31 and saved by8 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more frommichaelnielsen.org
-
The adoption and growth of the scientific journal system has created a body of shared knowledge for our civilization, a collective long-term memory which is the basis for much of human progress. This system has changed surprisingly little in the last 300 years. The internet offers us the first major opportunity to improve this collective long-term memory, and to create a collective short-term working memory, a conversational commons for the rapid collaborative development of ideas. The process of scientific discovery - how we do science - will change more over the next 20 years than in the past 300 years.
-
leading edge of the greatest change in the creative process since the invention of writing.
Science is an example par excellence of creative collaboration, yet scientific collaboration still takes place mainly via face-to-face meetings. -
there are major cultural barriers which are preventing scientists from getting involved, and so slowing down the progress of science.
-
The adoption of the journal system was achieved by subsidizing scientists who published their discoveries in journals. This same subsidy now inhibits the adoption of more effective technologies, because it continues to incentivize scientists to share their work in conventional journals, and not in more modern media.
-
We should aim to create an open scientific culture where as much information as possible is moved out of people’s heads and labs, onto the network, and into tools which can help us structure and filter the information. This means everything - data, scientific opinions, questions, ideas, folk knowledge, workflows, and everything else - the works. Information not on the network can’t do any good.
-
extreme openness. This means: making many more types of content available than just scientific papers; allowing creative reuse and modification of existing work through more open licensing and community norms; making all information not just human readable but also machine readable; providing open APIs to enable the building of additional services on top of the scientific literature, and possibly even multiple layers of increasingly powerful services.
-
To create an open scientific culture that embraces new online tools, two challenging tasks must be achieved: (1) build superb online tools; and (2) cause the cultural changes necessary for those tools to be accepted. The necessity of accomplishing both these tasks is obvious, yet projects in online science often focus mostly on building tools, with cultural change an afterthought. This is a mistake, for the tools are only part of the overall picture. It took just a few years for the first scientific journals (a tool) to be developed, but many decades of cultural change before journal publication was accepted as the gold standard for judging scientific contributions.
-
a top-down strategy that has been successfully used by the open access (OA) movement [3]
-
second strategy is bottom-up. It is for the people building the new online tools to also develop and boldly evangelize ways of measuring the contributions made with the tools. To understand what this means, imagine you’re a scientist sitting on a hiring committee that’s deciding whether or not to hire some scientist. Their curriculum vitae reports that they’ve helped build an open science wiki, and also write a blog. Unfortunately, the committee has no easy way of understanding the significance of these contributions, since as yet there are no broadly accepted metrics for assessing such contributions. The natural consequence is that such contributions are typically undervalued.
-
Is it possible to scale up this conversational model, and build an online collaboration market [4] to exchange questions and ideas, a sort of collective working memory for the scientific community?
-
Rather than hoarding their questions and ideas, as scientists do for fear of being scooped, the programmers revel in swapping them. Some of the world’s best programmers hang out in these forums, swapping tips, answering questions, and participating in the conversation.
-
Innocentive’s business model is aimed firmly at industrial rather than basic research, and so the incentives revolve around money and intellectual property, rather than reputation and citation.
-
FriendFeed allows messages to be passed back and forth in a lightweight way, so communities can form around common interests and shared friendships.
-
Lacking widely accepted metrics to measure contribution, scientists are unlikely to adopt FriendFeed en masse as a medium for scientific collaboration. And without widespread adoption, the utility of FriendFeed for scientific collaboration will remain relatively low.
-
Expert attention, the ultimate scarce resource in science, is very inefficiently allocated under existing practices for collaboration.
An efficient collaboration market would enable Alice and Bob to find this common interest, and exchange their know-how, in much the same way eBay and craigslist enable people to exchange goods and services. However, in order for this to be possible, a great deal of mutual trust is required. -
In economics, it’s been understood for hundreds of years that wealth is created when we lower barriers to trade, provided there is a trust infrastructure of laws and enforcement to prevent cheating and ensure trade is uncoerced. The basic idea, which goes back to David Ricardo in 1817, is to concentrate on areas where we have a comparative advantage, and to avoid areas where we have a comparative disadvantage.
-
recommend Bill Hooker’s series of essays on open science, Mitchell Waldrop’s article in Scientific American, and the Science Commons as starting places. There are some great communities of people online engaged in building a more open scientific culture - many of those people can be found in the Life Scientists and Science2.0 rooms on FriendFeed.
-
whenever the stakes are that high, secrecy pays off - and the science community is not alone in this. The shoe-salesman Bob may have high stakes in his business, but for Alice it is probably just one of many pairs of shoes. Analogies only go so far
Ever Notice?: Gain: AIGA Journal of Business and Design: Design & Business: AIGA
Tags: perception, pattern, photo, photography, design, creativity on 2008-08-27 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (1) -About
more fromwww.aiga.org
-
Noticing definitely draws on a set of skills that these kinds of characters embody and amplify, but at the heart of it you have to genuinely be interested in the world around you and in other people.
-
saying, “Yes, and...,” guides us to notice and act in response to what the rest of the team is doing. It becomes this collaborative problem-solving activity that happens to generate a performance, rather than the typical “stuff from the inside comes out” model of performance.
-
Me and You and Everyone We Know, but there was something deeply compelling about how that film took the observation of details and made them dramatic plot points (the tension as we watched a goldfish forgotten on top of a moving vehicle) or character traits (a child who passionately accumulates housewares) or symbolic elements (the clarion call of a wind-blown signpost). There was a lot that made that film engaging, but so much of what kept the viewer moving through the narrative seemed to be in the way July elevated those details.
-
giving yourself permission to “just be,” to receive without transmitting, makes it possible to really drink in sensory data and to really listen to other people with an incredible kind of unforced compassion.
-
the activity of noticing the first one, and documenting it, meant that I was ready to notice and document the second, and beyond. So when we saw the concert crowd and the vans, we were able to connect it: “Oh, this is the performer that we’ve been seeing all the ads for.” This process of trying to figure out what’s going on in a new place, of finding and understanding patterns and themes
-
what comes out of that is not just that she exists, but what her existence means
Neurophilosophy : Lunch with Heather Perry (voluntarily trepanned)
"...it was the increase in the volume of brainblood that gave the expanded consciousness...[which] must have been caused by more blood in the brain which meant there must have been less of something else. Then I realized that it must be the volume of cerebrospinal fluid that was decreased..." - from Related link "An Iillustrated history of trepanation"
Tags: brain, anatomy, surgery, trepanation, depression, creativity, history on 2008-08-16 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromscienceblogs.com
-
One of my initial reasons for wanting to have it done was for more mental energy and clarity.
-
If I were to compare it to drugs it would be like acid mixed with some kind of opiate. It certainly seemed to help with mental clarity and overall well-being, and I remember that feeling lasting for quite a while. Afterwards I reduced my dose of antidepressants for a while
Mind - Boredom May Let the Brain Recast the World in Productive, Creative Ways - NYTimes.com
Tags: boredom, brain, neuro, learning, creativity, obesity, addiction, depression on 2008-08-06 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.nytimes.com
-
Much of the research on the topic has focused on the bad company it tends to keep, from depression and overeating to smoking and drug use.
Yet boredom is more than a mere flagging of interest or a precursor to mischief. Some experts say that people tune things out for good reasons, and that over time boredom becomes a tool for sorting information — an increasingly sensitive spam filter. In various fields including neuroscience and education, research suggests that falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative at least as often as they are disruptive.
-
as if the boredom “had the power to exert pressure on individuals to stretch their inventive capacity,”
How to Unleash Your Creativity
Tags: creativity, education, teaching, children, testing on 2008-05-31 and saved by6 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.sciam.com
-
There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that I’ve found are essential for creative expression. The first and most important competency is “capturing”—preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them.
-
giving ourselves tough problems to solve. In tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas. The third area is “broadening.” The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections—so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things. And the last competency is “surrounding,” which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become.
-
take an adventure once a week
-
walk out the door for 20 minutes or so and see what happens to your thinking. When people walk, they often begin to integrate the insights and intuitions
-
When children are very young, they all express creativity, but by the end of the first grade, very few do so. This is because of socialization. They learn in school to stay on task and to stop daydreaming and asking silly questions. As a result, the expression of new ideas is largely shut down. We end up leaving creative expression to the misfits—the people who can’t be socialized.
-
we have a mythology about artistry that tends to be very daunting
-
In the laboratory, failure also produces a phenomenon called resurgence—the emergence of behaviors that used to be effective in that situation—that leads to a competition among behaviors and to new interconnections. In other words, failure actually stimulates creativity directly.
-
groups inhibit a lot of creative expression. Dominant people tend to do most of the talking, for one thing. But when people shift, everyone ends up working on the problem.
-
hypnagogic state. Think about how deliberate Dalí and Edison were or about how deliberate Julia’s techniques are. You don’t need to leave creativity to chance.
-
many people make the mistake of believing that there’s just no time to be creative, even to do something simple like paying attention to your thoughts and capturing them.
Epstein: Well, high tech is making this easier, fortunately. These days all you have to do to capture an idea is to pick up your PDA or memo recorder or even just to leave a message for yourself on your voice mail. You can even capture new melodies that way. -
I see our society moving in the wrong direction—toward an obsession with raising scores on standardized tests.
Cameron: I think that creativity is contagious and that the best thing we can do for children is to model for them what it’s like to be a creative individual.
The Frontal Cortex : The Hidden Cost of Smart Drugs
Tags: brain, memory, drugs, smart_drugs, neuro, learning, intelligence, creativity, aging on 2008-05-22 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromscienceblogs.com
-
the drugs were great for late-night cramming sessions, but that they seemed to suppress any kind of originality. In other words, increased focus came at the expense of the imagination.
Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain
Tags: memory, aging, neuro, learning, intelligence, creativity, brain on 2008-05-22 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.nytimes.com
- See Jonah Lehrer's post "The Hidden Cost of Smart Drugs"post by taryn930 on 2008-05-22
-
the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit
-
“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”
-
“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”
-
“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”
A psychological tour of the United States, in five maps.
Tags: richard_florida, creativity, personality on 2008-05-13 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.boston.com
-
This fuels a process of selective migration whereby agreeable and conscientious regions are drained of the most driven, most creative, and most mobile - only reinforcing their psychogeographic profiles, while magnifying the innovative edge in places where open-to-experience types concentrate.
Our evolving psychogeography means that our nation, its people, and its regions continue to sort themselves not just by education and skill, but by personality as well.
A List Apart: Articles: On Creativity
Tags: creativity, design, style on 2008-03-04 and saved by12 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.alistapart.com
-
Any reference to constraints that limit creativity is just another way of equating creativity with self-expression, an erroneous and irresponsible idea. Except for personal projects, self-expression has no place in design, but constraint is vital to design. No component fuels creativity more than constraint. Indeed, without constraint, creativity (and design) is irrelevant. The discovery process is mostly about finding constraints, which is why we must do such a thorough job of it.
John Palfrey » Blog Archive » Keith Sawyer's Group Genius
Tags: creativity, innovation on 2007-09-21 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromblogs.law.harvard.edu
-
Sawyer takes on the romantic myth of the solo author/inventor/genius with a persuasive argument about “the unique power of collaboration to generate innovation.”
Notation: * = Private bookmark and comment|… = Clipping [?] | … = Public highlight [?]
