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A 1960s art school experiment that redefined creativity

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

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Re: A 1960s art school experiment that redefined creativity

#21

Post by everyone »

smokel wrote: post #6
lkm0 wrote: post #2

This whole thing strikes me as coming from the wrong direction. Tying artistic and financial success, trying to apply some cargo cult "problem" engineering mentality to art. I feel like these articles illustrate quite well why the academic plastic arts have become so irrelevant today that we could say they are not part of human culture at large, in the sense that they have vanishing influence on public discourse.

Interestingly, most of scientific research is also not part of the public discourse.

I mean it's so advanced and esoteric.. we've been "digging" for centuries, the journey to the current coal face where new work is being done is so long you need a phd just to reach it.

Re: A 1960s art school experiment that redefined creativity

#22

Post by squidsoup »

reg_dunlop wrote: post #17
gh0stcat wrote: post #13

I'm struggling to understand what they define "problem finding" to be in this context, did anyone come away with a more concrete definition?

No. Here's one interpretation though, for the discourse: When given a task, some artists focused less on the objective and more on the process of observation. Observation of what, would be a logical next question. And I have to imagine and indulge in some projection here and guess that any of the artists may have been looking for more of a challenge, or more meaning. How to select some combination of objects, relativ…

> And I have to imagine and indulge in some projection here and guess that any of the artists may have been looking for more of a challenge, or more meaning

I think one reason it may be so difficult to express this concretely, is that artists are often looking for an ineffable quality.

Re: A 1960s art school experiment that redefined creativity

#23

Post by crabbone »

In my days in art academy, the running joke was that

    If you were accepted into the painting faculty, you were an artist,
    If you were accepted into graphics faculty, you were color-blind,
    If you were accepted into sculpture, you were blind,
    If you were accepted into art history, you couldn't be taught to draw.
While a little cruel... (I was in the graphics), the general idea was to say that art theory, art history, and especially psychology studies around art are absolute rubbish. These people seem to get into their line of work because they failed as artists (and don't understand / can't produce art).

Likewise, in this article, the approach to defining creative thinking is... so simplistic, and the test is so irrelevant...

Just to try to give you some background as to why a student could choose one approach or the other: if a student wasn't told why they need to draw a still life, they probably didn't care much for the outcome either. Artists rarely know why they prefer one composition over the other, especially in academic studies like... still life. To an artist, the selection of objects for a still life is really arbitrary, their arrangement is arbitrary -- it makes no difference. To make an interesting still life, one would have to find something that would interest other artists in it. Like, for example, how one can show different textures of the objects of the same nominal color using color? Or... would a technique that models volume through the thickness / intensity of contours work on mostly round objects? And so on.

Later, the article is trying to assess the artist's accomplishments in ways artists would frown upon. The number of exhibitions? The sales in prestigious galleries? Yeah... as a student I spent some time working in the lab of Kadishman (the guy who draws the same sheep over and over, and then sells it for insane $$). The "master" doesn't even draw the sheep anymore. It's all Shinkar / Bezalel students who do it :D And, honestly, the sheep is one of the biggest frauds I've personally witnessed in this profession (there are, of course, things like the diamond skull from Damien Hirst, which are more expensive because of the materials used, but I didn't have a chance to behold the miracle with my own eyes).

Re: A 1960s art school experiment that redefined creativity

#24

Post by SauntSolaire »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #14
fao_ wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the difficulty is we know vastly more, and have experimented with vastly more since the 19th century, that the majority of university learning these days, and the inherent challenge within that learning, is "how do we condense 200+ years of investigation, experimentation, and knowledge building into only a handful of years of learning?" For a lot of sciences, we are very lucky that it is still possible. But t…

> And then of course, there's the frequent crackpots. Pretty much anyone within a science discipline who is even decently well known, especially if they're in physics, gets multiple emails a day from crackpots about how their theories are going to "totally blow a hole in the established knowledge" I think at this point most of these people talk to chatbots instead, anecdotally the crank flow seems to have lessened.

Yes, until they send over an AI hallucinated manifesto which is 100x longer than the email would have been.

Re: A 1960s art school experiment that redefined creativity

#25

Post by uxhacker »

colechristensen wrote: post #11
uxhacker wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the harm? You can be in both worlds at the same time. If we think of Leonardo da Vinci he created both art that created problems, and inventions that solved problems. But these world where very separate.

Your mental models of the world are reflected in how you interact with it. If you have an idea that there's a split between "creating beautiful stuff" and "creating useful stuff" then your world turns into one where something is only one or the other where someone creating only does one or the other. These days it's thought of unique or special if something is both and the fact this isn't standard is influenced by th…

I understand where you’re coming from. I differ from this view. I think we can hold a dialectical view. We can recognise art that raises questions or creates problems, while also recognising design or technology that solves problems.

Human progress depends on both: defining the problem and solving it.

Re: A 1960s art school experiment that redefined creativity

#26

Post by godelski »

woolion wrote: post #19
colechristensen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish ancient Greek techne τέχνη hadn't gone through the split that left "art" on one side and "technology" (or work?) on the other. The split of art vs. design you're talking about or one of the many ways to divide the act of creation into a classical/romantic divide or one of the many other ways to describe it should be considered harmful. And I'm not trying to split hairs here but wishing the dichotomy you're tal…

To echo your point, there is no "art" at all without "technology"; from cave paintings, paint tubes, to digital tablets...

Is that true? I think for it to he true we'd have to overly abstract the definition of technology to the point of uselessness.

You can draw images in the sand. Is a stick "technology"? What about using your finger?

Do we need paints? There are natural dyes. I don't mean in the sense of extracting things but some are as simple as "smash this berry". I believe the answer to this is rather critical since you specifically mention cave paintings. Many of those were done by hand, not by brush.

What about things like rock balancing? Sand sculptures? Singing/vocal instruments? Poetry (spoken, not written)? Story telling (ditto)? And so on

There is so much we consider art that can be done by any human with no tool use nor any external objects. I won't even mention how people call a sunset a work of art, and I do think we should avoid that as it has the same problem I bring up with defining technology. But I do not think most people would consider speech or vocal sounds technology, though certainly we would include things like writing.

Re: A 1960s art school experiment that redefined creativity

#27

Post by sno6 »

gh0stcat wrote: post #13

I'm struggling to understand what they define "problem finding" to be in this context, did anyone come away with a more concrete definition?

I took it to mean their process was more divergent than convergent. They explored some branches, felt one had life, or tension, and then unfolded from there.

Re: A 1960s art school experiment that redefined creativity

#28

Post by kmoser »

lkm0 wrote: post #2

This whole thing strikes me as coming from the wrong direction. Tying artistic and financial success, trying to apply some cargo cult "problem" engineering mentality to art. I feel like these articles illustrate quite well why the academic plastic arts have become so irrelevant today that we could say they are not part of human culture at large, in the sense that they have vanishing influence on public discourse.

> Tying artistic and financial success [...]

If you're referring to the article's description of the study's measure of success, the metrics had little to nothing to do with direct financial gain.

> [...] in the sense that they have vanishing influence on public discourse.

Nothing inherently requires art to be a part of the public discourse. Sometimes artists create art for art's sake, and/or just to make a buck. Sure, occasionally some art makes it big in the public eye and becomes part of the zeitgeist, but the vast majority of art barely sees the light of day.

Re: A 1960s art school experiment that redefined creativity

#29

Post by colechristensen »

godelski wrote: post #26
woolion wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To echo your point, there is no "art" at all without "technology"; from cave paintings, paint tubes, to digital tablets...

Is that true? I think for it to he true we'd have to overly abstract the definition of technology to the point of uselessness. You can draw images in the sand. Is a stick "technology"? What about using your finger? Do we need paints? There are natural dyes. I don't mean in the sense of extracting things but some are as simple as "smash this berry". I believe the answer to this is rather critical since you specificall…

You strengthen my point about τέχνη.

It takes a considerable amount of development before you can make the distinction at all between separate concepts of art and technology. For a long time there wasn't a split because it was difficult to conceptualize how to split the two.

Re: A 1960s art school experiment that redefined creativity

#30

Post by reg_dunlop »

gh0stcat wrote: post #13

I'm struggling to understand what they define "problem finding" to be in this context, did anyone come away with a more concrete definition?

My first answer was disingenuous, so here's another interpretation.

I didn't see a definition in the article, however I was reading Edgar Payne's Compostion of Outdoor Painting after reading your comment, and I was surprised to find the book talked about problem finding.

"Art is the art of disguising art". This means artists have to make a representation of a material object while obscuring all the rules and principles required to make the representation.

The problem is: how to make art without making it blatantly obvious it was an effort to make?

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