Sprezzatura

(apologies, but i am going to explain my opinion here before waiting for you to answer. eit.)

i stopped watching 75-85% of the way through. i couldn't take all the "you know"s, "like"s and "um"s.

i'm not sure if the content wasn't appealing to me, or if her explanation was unexciting.

when i see great art or learn something awesome i feel something lift inside me. i have an emotional connection. this drew a blank.

i was a little surprised, since the blog post made sense to me. i agree with other commenters who mention have this fuzzy concept but not seeing it discussed in public much less defined.

for a "best" TED talk i'd recommend http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke...

she's a good speaker. there are other excellent speakers, too.

maybe the "worked on 8hrs a day for 6 weeks" build up raised my expectations, but she sounded nervous, laughed at her own unfunny and irrelevant jokes, and didn't create anything wondrous or lifting inside either my heart or my head.

Hamming asserts that people who have done great work fail to "plant acorns." They chase another great revelation instead of stepping back to the fundamental level where they started, and spend the rest of their life only working on great problems, not useful subproblems. I see no reason an artist's success would be different.

But back to that vulnerability. As an artist, you can connect to that immediately. It's moving to hear another artist talk that openly and honestly about something so central to their existence. One of my favourite things she said was about being a mule. We're all mules. And we can be proud of the effort, of continuing to show up, regardless of the result.

I'm a fairly hard-line atheist (I am open to actual proof ;), but there is something mystical about the eureka moment during the creative process. Sometimes it is a wave that comes at you when you hope to be ready, and you just try to catch it while you can. And several times I remember feeling the way she described the dancer becoming something more. I've seen that dancer before. Anyone who's created art for long enough has touched that, but as a logical person I'm almost ashamed to get that out-there describing my personal experiences. Hat's off to her for having the guts to do so and do so that openly.

I mean, no. I don't advocate intentional blindness to problems in our world. I would even go so far as to actually advocate a greater awareness of the weight of our impact in the world. We can learn something from knowing more what the impact of a dollar is.

But humans are nothing if not machines for selective attention. If every time I bought my lunch I thought about the fertilizers dripping into the ocean causing immense algal blooms full of asphyxiated fish and oh the smell! I'd probably starve.

If your life, the thing that puts you closest to your own understanding of divinity, is being creative; if you honestly have to face the idea of never being able to communicate like you did that one time not so long ago; if you have to keep going in face of that, well, I know what I'm not going to expend my attention toward.

But even so, the speech wasn't about finding ways to ignore some nasty personal tragedy. It's about finding an interpretation on the charity and capriciousness of the creative process. What really is the best way to contextualize the immense amount of discipline and work and training that goes into creation that can all amount to precisely nothing without something widely considered to be external to us?

Genius is 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration. Even when we can assume the sweat, we're still might end up short one spark. What gives?

(I apologize for the waxing here, but god this is such a fascinating philosophical question.)