I came across this from Austin Kleon via Lucy Bellwood and I felt like I needed to share it.
Something I noticed while I was in Greece recently was that humans have always created. People have always felt the need to capture an image, to visually tell a story, to make functional items beautiful or narrative, to represent someone on a grave stele or depict an idealized moment from their life. Art and creativity are part of the human experience. That’s why universities make students take Humanities as a course.
I think the quote above sums up one of the driving conflicts of being human in today’s culture (I say “one of,” not “the biggest of” or “the most important of.” There are a lot of conflicts out there and I refuse to put an opinion on whether one is more significant than another) – or at least, a conflict which I feel keenly as a creative person. It’s the conflict between efficiency and creativity, between product and producing, between resource management and exploratory wastefulness which does studies and sketches and paints and draws and spends months on an idea which no one thinks is important until the artist is dead.
There’s always an element of balance – human beings need data and numbers as much as we need spontaneity and experimentation to function as a society – but the point here is that the goal of art is not a product. Humans don’t exist to generate things; living isn’t about making more stuff in less time. We need things to live, and work has to go into making them or growing them or raising them, but we don’t need to do it all so damn quickly.
Art is for making us more human, not less.
