Reasons to be cheerful

Productive anonymity—the ability to experiment without much at stake except your own process of discovery.
 

Privacy—particularly, the ability to experience artworks in a relatively private environment, even if in public spaces. 

 

Time—to think and to not think; to look at art; to waste on dead-end art projects that no one will ever see again and that your best friends may remember better than you will, because to them it was an event but to you it was just a step along a long road. 

Liberation from art that is front-loaded with conscious intentionality. 


Benign neglect—the ability to do things with just enough attention to make you feel like you are part of a world and can go forward, but not so much that your gesture becomes a trademark and a creative prison.

Mira Schor

Gradual development and constant revision

But Adler’s statement suggests that creativity is some kind of specialty like piano tuning or knee surgery, or that it is something one picks up in art school. But I doubt if having an art degree or even a successful career in the art world is any guarantee of spontaneous "creativity" or the ability to impart it. Moreover, psychological studies of creativity have shown that the popular picture of the artist constantly making "creative leaps" does not match the actual procedures of most professional artists, including some famous names such as Alexander Calder or Picasso. Gradual development and constant revision are more likely than occasional moments of sudden inspiration.[29] In fact, as Philip Alperson has remarked, there is a "vast spectrum of ways in which artists work," a spectrum, I would add, that largely overlaps the approaches of makers and discoverers in many other fields.[30]

Larry Shiner

How do you exercise judgement in a discipline that has no rules?

How do you exercise judgement in a discipline that has no rules?
Or, how do you play a game without rules?
Or, how do you play a game in which the rules are constantly changing?
The unstable nature of the rules becomes the game.
The rules require adaptability and flexibility in a changing environment.
Think of fashion, or the stock market. or evolution.
Are there other areas?

Value is of no value

Try and tickle something inside you, your “weird humor.” You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world… You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO…

Try to do some BAD work—the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell—you are not responsible for the world—you are only responsible for your work—so DO IT.

Sol Lewitt in letter to Eva Hesse

This has been said many times in different ways, but it's not the call to make bad art that's interesting, it's the fact that the need to make good art is problematic. The concept of value is the opposite of creativity.

Why should that be?

How does it relate to education of art?

How can you have a sense of progress if the concept of good/bad is not just irrelevant, but an impediment?

Or, perhaps it's just that questions of value (good-and-bad, etc), come after the making. This is part of the process of appreciation.... 

I think not. I have a hunch that the process of assessment is another activity entirely unrelated to making. The so-called critical faculty is not just unhelpful, but unconnected to the making-process

willing to be very slow

 "I try to work one sentence at a time and be willing to wait a long time until the next sentence comes. I'm just willing to be very slow, and let the back of the mind come forward."

Lynda Barry

poetry is of many sorts and is all around us

"I think the first aim of someone teaching poetry in a high school should be to continuously demonstrate that poetry is of many sorts and is all around us; that a rhymed political slogan is poetry of a kind, for example, and the lyrics of a song by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan may be poetry of a very high order; that inevitably most people have commerce with poetry in some part of their lives"

Thom Gunn

Sketch for Feral Child picture