Or maybe, the limiting factor in one's ability to create art will be... creativity rather than the technical skills necessary to make movies, draw, or pluck strings.
Creativity isn’t magic, it’s a skill. There is no creativity without the application of it. By definition creativity produces something. Without skills it’s not possible to produce anything.
The act of creating teaches you to be better at creating, in that way and in that context. This is why people with practice and expertise (e.g., professional artists, like screenwriters and musicians) can reliably create new things.
To an extent. Take cooking for example though- I don't doubt that writing recipes and trying them builds ones creative muscle, on the other hand, I don't think being we'd be at a loss for great chefs if we were to automate the cutting of onions, the poaching of eggs, and the stirring of risotto.
Take poaching eggs for example. Let’s say you automate that 100% so as a human you never need to do it again. Well, how good are your omelettes then? It’s a similar activity — keeping eggs at the right temperature and agitation for the right amount of time. Every new thing you learn to do with eggs — poaching, scrambling, omelettes, soft-cooking for ramen — will teach you more about eggs and how to work with them.
So the more you automate your cooking with eggs the worse you get at all egg-related things. The KitchenBot-9000 poaches and scrambles perfect eggs, so why bother? And you lose the knowledge of how to do it, how to tell the 30-second difference between “not enough” and “too much.”
I don't agree. There's some skill, some theory, behind it. But mastering this alone is almost worthless.
There's a huge overlap between creatives and mental illness, particularly bipolar disorder. It seems perfectly mentally stable people lack that edge and insight. To me, that signals there is some magic behind it.
And it's magic because then it must not be rationale and it must not make sense, because the neurotypical can't see it.
I think it's sort of like how you can beat professional poker players with an algorithm that's nonsensical. They're professionals so they're only looking at rationale moves; they don't consider the nonsensical.
All artists I have known have spent most of their lives practicing. Just as I have practiced programming.
That's the biggest edge, commitment.
To think that you _need_ to be neurodivergent to be an artist is non-sensical and stating mastering the craft itself is worthless is indicative of a lack of respect for their work.
I'm baffled by this type of comment here in all honesty. Really, broaden your horizons.
Certainly, life-long commitment to some discipline is not something that is in the middle of the bell curve.
I don’t know if neurodivergence might have any overlap, but I wouldn’t be surprise that a study reveals it to be as correlated as the fact that most rich people were born in wealthy families.
> To think that you _need_ to be neurodivergent to be an artist
You will notice I never said this.
All I said, and is true, is there is a correlation between being an artist and being neurodivergent.
> stating mastering the craft itself is worthless
Where did I say this too?
It appears you're having an argument with a ghost. You're correct, that argument is baffling! I wonder then why you made it up if you're just gonna get baffled by it? Seems like a waste of time, no?
Look, art is two things: perspective and skill. One without the other is worthless.
I can have near perfect skill and recreate amazing works of art. And I will get nowhere. Or, I can have a unique and profound perspective but no skill, and then nobody will be able to decipher my perspective!
I'm sorry if I misunderstood, but please clarify how this two quotes don't align with what I said?
> But mastering this alone is almost worthless.
> And it's magic because then it must not be rationale and it must not make sense, because the neurotypical can't see it.
Not trying to take them out of context, but specifying them. You mention, from my understanding, that mastering is almost worthless without the magic, and the magic only being there if you're neurodivergent.
This implies one cannot be a proper artist if not neurodivergent. Now, I could be misinterpreting it, so I apologize in advance.
I never said the magic is "only" there if you're neurodivergent, I said it seems to me neurodivergent people seem to be more likely to have the magic.
> There's a huge overlap between creatives and mental illness
Keyword overlap, but I don't think it's 100%
Magic is maybe not the right word here, but I do think it's indescribable. It's some sort of perspective.
But I stand by this:
> that mastering is almost worthless without the magic
How, exactly, you obtain the magic is kind of unknown. But I do think you need it. Because skill alone is just not worth much outside of economics. You can make great corporate art, but you're not gonna be a great artist.
I think if you're perfectly rationally minded, you're going to struggle a lot to find that magic. I shouldn't say it's impossible, but I think it's close to.
Fair, I think the "magic" depends on other factors that may or may not lead to neurodivergence. Those being:
- Life experience
- Exposure/education when young
Of course, these might lead to neurodivergence or might not. The key thing is that the magic is a very unique, personal thing. Human, one can say. Also, through practice you come to understand new perspectives, something that is perhaps lessened in your view.
Either way, I've missunderstood your take to a degree, and had a much more radical interpretation of it.
I'm not sure I completely agree. In some ways, developing technical skills can drill creativity out of you and condition you to think in ways that are really quite rigid and formulaic.
99% of humanity have very little interest in creating. They're mimics, they're fine with copying, hitting repost, et al. You see this across all social media without exception (TikTok being the most obvious mimic example, but it's the same on Reddit as well). You see it in day to day life. You see it in how people spend their time. You see it in how people spend their money. And none of this is new.
The public can create vast amounts of spectacular original content right now using Dalle, MidJourney, Stable Diffusion - they have very little interest in doing so. Only a tiny fraction of the population has demonstrated that it cares what-so-ever about generative media. It's a passing curiosity for a flicker of an instant for the masses.
The hilariously fantastical premise of: if we just give people massive amounts of time, they'll dedicate their brains to creativity and exploration and live exceptionally fulfilling lives - we already know that's a lie for the masses. That is not what they do at all if you give them enormous amounts of time, they sit around doing nothing much at all (and if you give them enormous amounts of money to go with it, they do really dumb things with it, mostly focused on rampant consumerism). The reason it doesn't work is because all people are not created equal, all people are not the same, all brains are not wired the same, the masses are mimics, they are unable & unwilling to originate as a prime focus (and nothing can change that).
That's simply untrue. Children have a natural inclination to create art. It is slowly drilled out of them by various factors, in large part, economic pressures. One of my best friends has a natural talent for drawing. He even made a children's book. Guess what? He became a cop because being a graphic artist is too precarious. If we alleviate the pressures that cause people to become closed off to the possibility of creating art, more people will be open to it.
Nah, creativity cannot be separated from the means. "The medium is the message". It is precisely the interaction of technical skill and the mind that creates something truly wonderful.
That's not exactly what McLuhan meant by that statement. "The medium is the message" refers more to how the medium itself influences the way a message is perceived by an audience. It is not an assessment of the creative process itself. It's not as though I disagree entirely with what you're saying though. There are certainly ways in which the medium is highly influential over the process of creating something. But it's a mixed bag, and technical skill is not something to be celebrated in all cases. A technically accurate painting is oftentimes quite dull and uninspired. One could argue that creativity isn't just the interaction of skill and mind, but rather the ability to think beyond the medium, to embrace accidents, imperfections, and impulsive decisions.
You don't need any special technical skills to write the next great American novel. Few people actually do it. Talent and dedication are as elusive as ever.
You: escape the oppressive technical limitations of scoring a piece for an orchestra through novel use of technology.
Csound: To make a sine tone, we'll describe the oscillator in a textfile as if it were a musical instrument. You can think of this textfile as a blueprint for a kind of digital orchestra. Later we'll specify how to "play" this orchestra using another text file, called the score.
The issue is that the human performance of those things is precisely how creativity is expressed. You can tell an AI to write a story you envision but if there’s nothing unique in the presentation (or it copies the presentation from existing media to a large extent) you still end up with boring output.
