Imcreativity - in search of impractical creativity

Tonight, I turned my attention to the meaning of creativity. Wikipedia defines creativity as that which is both novel and useful. Using this definition, any new product or technology is creative.

But is art useful? My first thought is no. However, the reinforcement of beauty is a very useful pursuit in that it is often forgotten amid the plethora of pain and suffering we encounter. But is appreciation on par with practical use, as in the case of a new product or technology? If you're trying to save a life, then appreciation is not only useless but irrational. However, if you're trying to cheer someone up, then don't count on a shiny new toy to bring a lasting smile. Although, a novel antidepressant might help.

I'll leave it up to others to compare the importance of appreciation and action in our lives. What I want to do is to plant the seed of a new kind of creativity that is more suited to art. This kind of creativity is novel, but it is not useful. It is impractical. To distinguish this from creativity, I call this imcreativity. If something is imcreative, then it is new and worthy of appreciation but not useful and cannot be applied to achieve a practical result.

An example of an imcreative work of art is Dalí's The Persistence of Memory. This famous painting brings to mind any number of strange thoughts, like the relativity of time, a summer day so hot that even clocks melt, a paranoid man who was deathly afraid of grasshoppers, and so on. But is this painting useful in any real sense, except perhaps for understanding more about Dalí or his ingenious and outrageous self-promotion techniques? I don't see how.

Of course everything can be useful for something, even if only to recognize that it isn't useful and that a useful use of time would be not to waste any more time thinking about it. But that useless scenario aside, some things are clearly not useful while also being worthy of appreciation. Art tends to fall into this category in that, like philosophy, it does not seek to provide useful answers but to provoke interesting questions. A beautiful seascape painting is certainly worthy of appreciation, but it will not buy you a yacht. It will, however, help you appreciate the beauty of nature, just as an abstract painting might, if you open your mind wide enough, help you appreciate color and form in nature.

Back to my notion of imcreativity, I find it, as a concept, useful because it frees me to explore dissimilar concepts in a visual space without worrying that it makes a point (i.e., that it serves as an illustration). Art blurs boundaries and being imcreative helps it achieve that.

Relevant art today

It seems to me that art today should either be pretty or make a point, with the former being the wiser of choices. Art no longer has to make an aristocrat look stately or serve the Church. Today, it's free to do whatever it wants, including announce that it's not art at all or, conversely, that everything is.

But to make art relevant or meaningful to modern audiences, it needs to mean something to them. And in this age, people, at least those with Internet access, seem to be thinking about such issues as information overload, trivial virtual social connections, the increasing loss of privacy online, and rampant identify theft.

Then again, art can address any social issue and remain relevant. And it should. It's visual communication. It should say everything that's interesting visually, which is just about everything.

And I say that making pretty art is wiser because, at the end of the day, after either our battles have been won or we are tired of fighting them, what matters most are that we still want to fight, to live, and to appreciate the value of living. And beauty adds value.

What art isn't?

Below is something I wrote very late a few nights ago and then revised tonight. I'm not sure if it's any good. But I can't say I disagree with it. I don't know.

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I appreciate art because it defies definition. I don't know what art is in the general sense. It's art. Art defines itself. By not defining itself.

Art defines itself by defying itself. Art doesn't like to be defined and, therefore, confined. Art would be a form of rebellion if it could tolerate being confined to a single form.

Back to nature. Categories abound. Logic and structure abounds. Sense just makes sense.

Conformity. Stability. Comfort. Sleep. 8-5. (Nobody ever did 9-5.)

Order. We need order to make sense of things. Because of how our brains work, we can't help it. Thinking is ordering. It helps us survive. We make sense of things automagically.

But art embraces order as well as disorder. In his book, The Art Spirit, which I’ve been reading for ages now and need to finish, Robert Henri equates art with an appreciation of order. It is, but it also isn't. Art has moods.

If I recall, Heidegger applauded art's ability, and made it a necessary quality of valued art, to escape rationalization or, in other words, to blur and, more likely with modern art, blow up preconceptions. Art helps us think differently about the same things.

You might ask, "What use is art?" The most common answer: It helps us appreciate life. Second: It reminds us of beauty.

But art is also a form of philosophy, visual in my case, in that it provides us with stimuli that provoke us to ponder ourselves and the world around us. Moreover, it asks us to reconsider our place and, even more, if having a place makes sense.

Put a brick on a pedestal. Strip this ultimate symbol of utility and function of its common purpose (assuming the pedestal itself isn't made of brick). You might be tempted in a creative exercise to carve a tiny door and two windows into it.

This time, do nothing. Look at it, differently. Strip away not only its preconceived, practical, pedestrian purpose, but also, if you can, its very definition. It isn’t a brick. Voilà! It isn’t even a rectangle if you can help it. It just is.

That's art.

Sort of. It's also pretty.

What I'm learning

I am learning two things about my art, specifically oil painting, that I need to find what I love to make (as art) and that I need to embrace some measure of irrationality. With regard to subject, it hit me that I have little interest, aside the fun of playing or the technical challenge, in painting, for example, a still life with random objects. This might sound like a strange thought, but thinking about it made me realize that I haven't taken much time to think about what I want to paint, and specifically to paint to remember. I need to care about an object before I paint it. The same applies to the people I paint, in which case, I have to at least find them psychologically interesting.

Second, with regard to irrationality, it hit me yesterday that one reason my paintings aren't very interesting so far is that they don't allow for enough disorder, such as unfinished strokes or strikingly raw colors and lines. And to create such disorder, I need to be in a mindset that encourages it, which isn't pure practicality. I think the most interesting paintings balance order with disorder or, at least, give disorder a rightful spot at the table.

And on an unrelated aside, I've gleefully rediscovered the work of Frans Hals.

Against efficiency as a motivating factor in the production of art

I’m painting in oils again. A traditional medium. Slow. Messy. Smelly. I love it!

I'm getting comfortable with it, relearning how to blend and, generally speaking, to use the medium, tools, and ground, themselves, to reveal a pleasing result.

But it takes work. And one of my current, preparatory goals is realism. Accuracy. Not photorealism, because I like brushstrokes (and why not take a photo?). But to make what I paint look like what I see. I'm pretty good at it without assistance.

But what if I do use assistance? What if, for example, I paint on top of a photograph or a tracing from one? There don't have to be any rules in art, so I wouldn't be cheating. I'm my own authority (aside from nature). And the process would be faster. I'm already using a grid to ensure basic proportionality in a portrait I'm painting now. So, why not go the limit and automate and, it would seem, improve the process as much as possible?

But it feels wrong! It's boring. Boring is wrong. I might as well work in a paint-by-number factory.

It isn't art. Okay, it could be a Warholian commentary on consumerism (even though we're into prosumerism). Art can be anything. But punish myself in the repetitive, robotic (no offense, future overlords) process? Shoot me.