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Creative Community: gold mine (part 3 of 3)
In the last post, I said that artists are all hunting for something new and that the most profitable way for us to conduct the hunt is to engage in an open-minded dialog about creative possibility until one of us happens to think of something no one has done before. It’s a process that you can compare to mass prospecting for gold. By day, we each start poking around our own patch of the mountain, but that evening we retire to the frontier saloon and compare notes on what we tried and where we tried it.
We know about milieu. We know that artists find themselves in certain contexts and draw inspiration from each other. Before Gaugin found Tahiti, he lived in the same apartment as Picasso and painted alongside him. The Impressionists had meetings and organized shows in order to display their new vision and to share their new ideas about paintings with each other. We know that.
I think that among really creative people, good ideas are springing out all the time, getting tested, getting copied, getting expounded upon, getting re-adapted.
As social media has taught us that we are all inter-connected, it’s a mistake to credit only the inner-circles of the real innovators with their innovations. I started this essay by asking the question: what good have we done if we end our creative life without ever building an audience?
Here’s my idea: by participating in creative community, we are all combing through the annals of art, looking over and over again through what has been done, talking about it, looking together, until one day a group of us finds an area in which something is missing that is when Rap is born, when Cubism is born, when Transcendentalism is born.
If you’re here, you are helping us all to look. If you left, if you weren’t here to jostle Tabitha who interrupts Tim who has an idea for Janson who bumps into Green, as we all prospect the mountains of creativity, then Green might not have taken over Sean’s patch of land, so that Sean has to go off down the mountain only to strike that new vein of artist gold that we’d all passed over the last six times might not fulfill his destiny and miss it too.
In this series: