creativity

What Is Curation These Days?

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I was perusing the Arts and Letters Daily site and saw a link to a Weekly Standard article discussing how the idea of curation has evolved from PT Barnum’s American Museum to a professionalization of the process to the current state where:

…“curating” has emerged in recent years as a ubiquitous cultural tag for fashion, groceries, Instagram posts, Pinterest accounts, and much else. Grammy winner Usher “curated” a July 4 fireworks and light show for Macy’s. On its website, a strip club in New York promised a few years ago to “curate a night of Curious burlesque.” Self-help gurus suggest that by self-curating—decluttering your life—you can find inner peace.

The mention of social media posts as forum to present a collection of things, ideas, images, etc that one has personally curated reminded me of a post I made last month about the search for authentic experiences.

In that post, I cited a CityLab piece that suggested that in aggregate, the unique experiences presented on social media sites blended in a bland sameness.

Consumers craving “authentic” experiences tend to build their digital personas by recycling the same kinds of content that populate their own feeds. Especially on Instagram, photos of under-the-radar coffee shops, building interiors, and artful design objects begin to look utterly banal as they aggregate by the thousand. The real world, without any impetus other than the encouragement of the market, has conformed to these aesthetic standards in response.

I started to wonder if arts organizations might have a role to play in helping people stand out by bringing the focus more sharply on them as an individual again. Nina Simon has talked about setting up pop up museums in bars where people can display artifacts of their failed relationships. Providing this sort of opportunity allows people to curate as a fish in a much smaller pond and lends some of the prestige and imprimatur of an arts organization to the individual.

Even if every other arts organization replicates the same program, the fact the experience is only occurring at a single physical location avoids the problem of being able to see 100 variations on an idea in 15 minutes that exists with social media curation.  Sure the curator receives fewer “likes” but hopefully the face to face validation ultimately feels more valuable.

Now my suggestion that an arts organization would be lending their prestige to amateurs might raise the hackles of some who fear the diminution of their reputation. Others would counter that arts organizations need to recognize reality and not seek to preserve their reputation at the cost of a diminishing audience.

Both views have merit. The degree to which an arts or cultural organization invests themselves in providing these opportunities and promoting what people have curated should be well considered.

Being associated with something silly or low quality may be embarrassing, but there is an opportunity to recover. The Weekly Standard makes reference to the Confederate statuary which is being torn down around the country. It is often mentioned that many of those statues were erected years after the Civil War ended and were funded by various interest groups which strikes me essentially as a form of curation by the public. Towns and cities permitted the placement of those statues and now find themselves involved in some controversy.

Lest you interpret this as a cautionary tale against being too permissive or emphatically supportive in any future programs that allow community participation, it is just as much a warning about hewing closely to any longstanding, potentially unsavory associations your organization has had that may come to light. Being viewed as increasingly open and welcoming to involvement by the breadth of the community might mitigate any negative historic associations.

Math, Science, Theater All Win Today

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This video tweeted by Massachusetts Math teacher Kim Spek made me very happy today. h/t to Sarah Carleton

Perfect statement illustrating the intersection of science, math, theater and wonder. Nothing more I can say except follow the link and check out the slo-mo version on her Twitter feed to better see how the transformation works.

Forging Your Our Purpose(s)

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There was a piece in Harvard Business Review that made me realize we need to place “finding one’s purpose in life” in the same category as concepts about finding true love and instant success being experienced by special geniuses. It makes for great movie plots, but the reality is that all these things are nearly always the result of unacknowledged hard work and dedication.

The title of John Coleman’s piece, “You Don’t Find Your Purpose — You Build It” sums it up as all good titles do.

It isn’t just movies, but inspirational books/speakers and societal expectations like declaring your college major at 18 years old which reinforce this idea that we need to have a purpose to drive us through life.

In the article, Coleman expounds on the following misconceptions we have about life’s purpose.

Misconception #1: Purpose is only a thing you find.
Misconception #2: Purpose is a single thing.
Misconception #3: Purpose is stable over time.

The article is short so I will let you read the details on each if you would like to know more.

One brief passage relates back to what I have been writing about recently in regard to the idea that creativity is a personal choice and shaped by society:

In achieving professional purpose, most of us have to focus as much on making our work meaningful as in taking meaning from it. Put differently, purpose is a thing you build, not a thing you find. Almost any work can possess remarkable purpose.

Just as the individual decides whether something is a creative exercise and societal pressure often shapes that, so too can an individual determine whether what they are doing has purpose and societal pressure likewise can shape that.

I probably don’t have to point out that while these are similar dynamics, they aren’t necessarily closely related. There are plenty of creative pursuits that individuals and society don’t find to be worthwhile and plenty of things deemed to be worthy purposes that are not considered to be particularly creative.

Creativity Is Partially A Social Construct

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When I was writing my post last week about research suggesting that creativity is often a choice people make, I kept seeing citations referencing an article written by Howard Becker. So I followed up on those citations. It was actually Becker that pointed out many times creative practice involves executing repetitive tasks.

In his article, Becker suggests there is a lot of what we would objectively consider creativity being done out there. It isn’t rare or special at all.  However, societal rules often dictate who and what gets to be considered creative. It is not what is being done, but rather who is doing it.

This doesn’t contradict the idea that creativity is an individual’s choice because internal perception about what is worthwhile is often shaped by external factors, including societal perceptions. Whether you decide to self-censor or just do it, and the rationalization behind just doing it, can be very personal.

There have been other articles written about the fact that people say they value creativity but are afraid of the disruption it might introduce so what is acceptable creativity often falls in a pretty narrow range.

Or as Becker puts it, (my emphasis)

I think it likely that what we, from a different standpoint, might call creative often makes trouble by being “too” creative, too different, not easily assimilable by the organizational apparatus already in place to deal with the category its products belong to, and thus not entitled to such an honorific title as “creative.” Only a short distance separates “creative: from “pain in the ass.”

Becker says there is creativity all around us, but it is being performed by groups who aren’t “allowed” to be creative for various reasons.

Conventional judges, working in conventional organizations, may well classify whatever such workers do as ordinary, certainly not creative or original, because that entire category of work or, alternatively, any kind of work done by members of those social categories, conventionally falls into the category of “uninteresting” and therefore essentially incapable of generating creativity. If the problems those people deal with in their work aren’t “important,” no solution they create can deserve the label of “creative.”

I wondered if an element of this is what reinforced the idea of the starving artist–the sense that the suffering outsider has license to be creative in a manner and magnitude that a person without that backstory isn’t. Accidentally mix up the bios and maybe the starving artist has to starve a little longer while the person standing to their left gets discovered.

Becker cites the example of a mother who has to balance the dietary preferences of a family of fussy eaters against a food budget, what is stocked in the stores and how much time is available for preparation. In other environments, a person navigating such challenges with aplomb might be lauded. Mom’s efforts often pass without comment.

No one gives “genius awards” to these inventors. Not even James Beard Awards for creative cookery. Their creativity goes unremarked and does not provide the subject matter for studies in the field (although culinary critics of course will treat similar experiments by well-known chefs with awe and reverence). Conventional thinking does not imagine that women who are not specially trained and educated can be creative, and some people still think that women are simply, perhaps genetically, incapable of the kind of unusual thinking that merits the word “creative.”

I think there is still more to consider about creativity than what I have written about in the last few days. In an email last week to Carter Gillies, I noted that people often talk about creative practice providing a sense of transcendence and connection with something greater. Theater, dance, song and visual arts all originated with religious and spiritual practice. It isn’t unreasonable to think that people continue to identify with some element of this.

In part, whether you feel a sense of that greater connection may define whether you view an activity is drudgery or having creative associations.