Innovation & Art

I've these really neat conversations with my instructor at the art studio that I go to. She likes to dive into philosophy when explaining approaches to art, and what can be more interesting than that :) We have had many such conversations, I'll some day write on the others, which were equally interesting, but let me elaborate on the latest one which left me thinking for a while.

So, few days ago we were talking about a new piece I'm working on. I told her I know exactly how I would go about doing this, and I don't want to do it that way. I've this concept, which now in hindsight doesn't seem all that right, of not doing the the same thing again. By that I mean that, if I do use a certain idea and style I use it once for a piece, I don't go about exploiting it as such. My intent is to keep things dynamic, and to venture into as many things that I can(perhaps to learn more?).

But people like to make a series of paintings on a idea that they have, and they use a similar style for all of those. So you get a nice set of pieces that go very well with each other, and form what is called, a 'body of work'. This is what most artists seem to be doing, and that is how someone gets interested in their work. It's like Hitchcock making a series of suspense thrillers.

So, what she was trying to imply is that, dynamic ideas are good, but the dynamism should be paced out. In other words, she was implying that innovation is not always a good thing. If we innovate something, and keep working on that idea, we refine it and make it more sophisticated. And that makes for good art, which is appreciated and understood.

To conclude, innovation should be accompanied by refinement. And refinement reaches a stage where we call it 'art'.

Talk about refinement, here's a Hyundai commercial for that. Needless to say I really dig what this company is upto.

The unreachable 'z'

Talking to a friend recently, he came up with a question that has left me thinking. A question for which I don't have an answer.

'What do we do with the things we do?'

'What is the ultimate aim of things we follow so passionately, spending so much time and effort?'

I, for the life of me, don't have answers to these questions, perfectly right questions to ask. These days I spend a fair amount of time on my 'hobbies'. Time, the most valuable thing in the universe you can expend, you spend so much of it on following your passions. What do you do with that?

It's forthrightly easy to say that the destination doesn't matter, it's the journey that really counts. But I think that this is a feel-good, but overrated, and highly flawed argument. After thinking a bit over this, I find asking these questions is important to bring things in perspective. Though just asking such questions will not make things concrete, for most things.

I found that asking these questions, makes you think where you are with your 'hobby' and how much better you can get at it by setting some tangible goals. This ROI oriented talk sounds all very management-training-styled, but no. Think over it, the more you think, you'll make your passion for the things you love stronger. You'll aim for the rainbow, in process you might just cross couple of mountains and valleys, but you'll be well off than before.

But then this brings me back to the original questions. At the end of it, you might manage to get from 'a' to 'g' instead of 'd', but there is no 'z', not in this lifetime. Or put other way, the 'z', the relative 'z', is always unreachable from where you stand. Then what do you do, does that make all of this futile? I think, reaching far enough is satisfying enough, you don't need a 'z' to attain, and even if you did you wouldn't know!

2010

Aah.. another instance of blogger's block hitting bad at me. The only savior was the no-brainer topic one can absolutely write about, new year resolutions.

I generally don't fall for such hocus-pocus cause generally these are self-motivational with lesser focus. But this year it is different. It is different because I'm freakishly dissatisfied about the current year and I really need to make some resolutions. 2009 has undoubtedly been the fastest year in time with a lot of activity and scaringly less achievement. Not that I'm a achiever with bunch of trophies on my shiny desk, but this time it actually feels like there was a lull. May be it has got to do with the phase I'm in, which by itself won't have any peaks, unless off-course I drag myself to do something. The key being initiative, and a sustained one at that.

2009 hasn't been that bad on the creative front though. I've been delving deeper into my pursuits, and I'm quite pleased looking back. Now what I need again is, sustained initiative. Hope 2010 keeps it going and further.

I really want to do something, or at the least start doing something, which can some day count as an achievement. Now if you look at the wording of that sentence, it reflects a typical me as people say it. Lot of probability. I would like to change, no, I want to change that. In terms of tangible things, I want to be more fit, proactive, creative & productive.

Happy new year.

Inertia

I'm dead tired. Tired with this thing called inertia. And its not the Newton's inertia, that is slightly better. There, if you are in motion, you keep being motion. The inertia I've currently makes me stop if I'm in motion, and makes me stoop if I'm stopped.

It is damn difficult to get out of it, has an over-powering omnipresence of sorts. Now all this sounds pretty whimsical, but heck it is true. I lose my initiative, my excitement and my enthusiasm, pretty soon after it gets back. Not being able to maintain it, I'm tracing the root cause. And I have a strong feeling it is "motivation".

My posts these days are mostly coming out of random conversations with friends. In a recent one, the conclusion was that, there is no motivation because there is no goal. Then again, there is no goal because there is no motivation. In this typically, what you could call, a vicious cycle the thing getting killed is 'progress'.

To break the cycle need a strong, equally over-powering, momentum that can guarantee an uninterrupted supply of motivation without really having to have a goal or a set of goals. The deal is to find it, and google doesn't help. There is a spoon, and there are forks and knives too, if you care to look the other side.

Short attention spans

There is pandemic, and no...its not the flu, its the increasingingly short attention span. I'm finding it more and more difficult to concentrate hard enough for a long time on something. I get distracted and start doing something else pretty soon. But for me, I have the awareness that I'm affected and I have been trying to counter-act it and the endeavors have more or less been successful. I worry about the kids which are growing on this, and who may not be able to fight this with trivial effort.

General discussion among friends, revealed that many others are also affected by this syndrome, if I may call it. The primary culprit in my opinion is the internet. You would say I'm just passing the buck of blame on something that is not-me..but wait, let me explain why.

With internet, we are getting more and more used to "going through" articles and information. We don't "read" them, generally. And this is for articles, for other web pages we don't even glance, there are nice shiny icons and buttons where are attention is, and we hit them. They are designed so that we just hit them, and don't have to go through reading what to do at that point. Most of the web is designed to be come-and-go type, you are not expected to spend a awful lot of time on the page, and which is design-wise perfect.

But then it has fall-outs. Short attention spans. How many of you can survive reading a 5 page article line-by-line even though it seems ice-creamy interesting? Twitter is a living, thriving and running proof of this phenomenon. It is growing like a parasite on people's inability to read "long" stretches of information (like this :P), and feeding them with short, sometimes incoherent and mostly pointless bytes of data. Twitter seems to be a nemesis of blogging, but its not, its the short attention span. And I wouldn't be surprised if this internet addicted race of ours, in not so distant future would be turned into 10-second-Tom-o-sapiens.

EDIT:

AG provided a link to an interesting article related to this.