TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "genius"
![Against recreativity: Critics and artists are obsessed with remix culture
Over at Slate, Simon Reynolds lumps a recent crop of books on remixing and artistic theft (mine included) into a field called “recreativity.” His final point:
The stealing and the storing is the easy part. The much harder—and forever mysterious—stage is the transformation of the borrowed materials. Recreativity has nothing to say about this stage of the process, the bit where, every so often, genius comes into play. It’s not the fact or the act of theft but what’s done with the stolen thing that counts: the spin added that “makes it new” (to twist slightly the modernist injunction of Ezra Pound, a major exponent of quotation and allusion himself). The hallmark, or proof, of genius, in fact, is not merely transmitting or remixing. It’s fashioning something that others will someday want to steal.
Not sure if Reynolds made it to the end of chapter two in my book (all the pull quotes he uses are from chapter one) but here’s the last paragraph:
In the end, merely imitating your heroes is not flattering them. Transforming their work into something of your own is how you flatter them. Adding something to the world that only you can add.
Or, stealing a bit from Coppola, how I usually end the Steal talk:
Take [the thing you’ve stolen] back to your desk, combine it with your own ideas and your thoughts, transform it into something new, and then put it out into the world so we can steal from you.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9ajycUZy91reaoyfo1_500.jpg)
Against recreativity: Critics and artists are obsessed with remix culture
Over at Slate, Simon Reynolds lumps a recent crop of books on remixing and artistic theft (mine included) into a field called “recreativity.” His final point:
The stealing and the storing is the easy part. The much harder—and forever mysterious—stage is the transformation of the borrowed materials. Recreativity has nothing to say about this stage of the process, the bit where, every so often, genius comes into play. It’s not the fact or the act of theft but what’s done with the stolen thing that counts: the spin added that “makes it new” (to twist slightly the modernist injunction of Ezra Pound, a major exponent of quotation and allusion himself). The hallmark, or proof, of genius, in fact, is not merely transmitting or remixing. It’s fashioning something that others will someday want to steal.
Not sure if Reynolds made it to the end of chapter two in my book (all the pull quotes he uses are from chapter one) but here’s the last paragraph:
In the end, merely imitating your heroes is not flattering them. Transforming their work into something of your own is how you flatter them. Adding something to the world that only you can add.
Or, stealing a bit from Coppola, how I usually end the Steal talk:
Take [the thing you’ve stolen] back to your desk, combine it with your own ideas and your thoughts, transform it into something new, and then put it out into the world so we can steal from you.
(Source: digitalbookclub)
Elizabeth Gilbert: A new way to think about creativity
On the trouble with *being* a genius instead of *having* a genius:
…and all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone, of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands, you know? And even the ones who didn’t literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts. Norman Mailer, just before he died, last interview, he said “Every one of my books has killed me a little more.” An extraordinary statement to make about your life’s work. But we don’t even blink when we hear somebody say this because we’ve heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we’ve completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish.
And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea? Are you comfortable with that — because you look at it even from an inch away and, you know — I’m not at all comfortable with that assumption. I think it’s odious. And I also think it’s dangerous, and I don’t want to see it perpetuated into the next century. I think it’s better if we encourage our great creative minds to live.
Great talk. Don’t miss her profile of Tom Waits.
(Source: youtube.com)
Great profile on Lewis Hyde, the author of THE GIFT, and his new book about the Cultural Commons:
For Hyde, redressing the balance between private (corporate, individual) and common (public) interests depends not just on effective policy but also on recovering the idea of the cultural commons as a deeply American concept. To that end, he excavates a history of the American imagination in which the emphasis is not on the lone genius (Thoreau scribbling hermetically in the Massachusetts woods) but on the anonymous pamphleteer, the inventor eager to share his discoveries. In an essay that offers a preview of his book (posted, fittingly, on his Web site), Hyde posits that the history of the commons and of the creative self are, in fact, twin histories. “The citizen called into being by a republic of freehold farms,” he writes, “is close cousin to the writer who built himself that cabin at Walden Pond. But along with such mainstream icons goes a shadow tradition, the one that made Jefferson skeptical of patents, the one that made even Thoreau argue late in life that every ‘town should have … a primitive forest …, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever,’ the one that led the framers of the Constitution to balance ‘exclusive right’ with ‘limited times.’ It is a tradition worth recovering.”
The idea that genius does not spring from nowhere:
A full 60 pages of his new manuscript are devoted to debunking the Emersonian view of Franklin as “America’s first self-made man” and replacing it with a portrait of Franklin as a “commoner,” a man whose defining talent was for absorbing, repurposing and synthesizing the culture around him, like some colonial M.C. The law of conservation of charge, the eponymous stove, the precise path of the Gulf Stream: Hyde shoves aside each of Franklin’s “discoveries” to uncover thick foundations of pre-existing knowledge and scientific collaboration. The point of all this is not to prove that Franklin wasn’t a genius but to show that his genius didn’t burst out of thin air. “It takes a capacious mind to play host to … others and to find new ways to combine what they have to offer,” Hyde writes, “but not a mind for whom there are no masters, not a ‘unique.’ Quite the opposite — this is a mind willing to be taught, willing to be inhabited, willing to labor in the cultural commons.”
[…]
Genius, Hyde believes, needs to “tinker in a collective shop.”
“I’ve thought of doing a version of Emerson in which you simply take every sentence of ‘Self-Reliance’ and flip it,” Hyde says. “So like at the beginning he says, ‘Yesterday I read in a book somebody stating very well an idea I had myself, and I felt ashamed that I hadn’t expressed it myself.’ Well, you could say, ‘Yesterday I read in a book somebody stating very well an idea I had myself, and I felt glad that I was not alone, and that my ideas were not my ideas.’ You know, where is the master who could teach Emerson?”
