The Specialist, the Anti-Artist

Artists often become specialists, gradually becoming better and better at their chosen technique to the point of mastery, yet this, like any restriction, is a death of creativity, and thus the death of artistry. In such artists, their technique becomes less and less creative as it becomes more and more focused and refined (consider, for example, a hyper-realistic portrait painter). The philosophy at work is that the subject is what is creative in such artists, not the technique, yet frequently this too becomes more and more restricted because as artists attain their mastery they tend to specialise in subjects as well as in their craft, specialising in portraits, or trees, or animals, limiting both their subject and their technique, always moving down a narrower and narrower tunnel as they work over the years, more and more constricted, mechanical, blind. At this point, is the artist creative at all? More to the point, does and artist need to be creative?

The answer is of course, yes, yes! The point of art is creativity, to discover new things and to push humanity towards new ideals. If art is about humanity, communication between people, then the artist must be an explorer and curious, a communicator or feelings and ideas. To specialise is to become more mechanical, as machine-like as our hyper-realistic portrait painter. A camera or computer can never be an artist, they can only communicate what it means to be a camera or a computer, which is of interest only to other cameras (or academics, the killers of art by analysis).

The artist is an explorer, and what he or she explores is the new, the future, things that are now unseen. The only way this can be accomplished is creatively. Specialisation limits creativity, and at its most extreme is a hindrance, not an aid.

If art is about creativity, how can an artist learn? Advancement is ruling in and ruling out, evolution, and mastery of technique is important if an artist is to create good quality work, yet an artist must always be aware of the limitations of specialisation. In short, the ideal artist is master of all techniques, and able to pick and choose the best one for each situation.

It is always more creative, and a greater display of ability, to be good at several techniques than to master any one.

Creativity

Or why creative ideas are unpopular, and popular ideas are uncreative!

Governments eschew the value of having a creative economy, the value of creativity. Free thinking and creative acting has great benefits. Revolutionary ideas demand it, and can transform the world drastically for the better. Yet, governments rarely actually mean that they would actually like creative ideas. For a start, creative ideas are always and necessarily subversive, and always and necessarily unpopular.

Even in art, projects often list in their success criteria for an idea or submission that it is creative, which is rarely true. Someone, at some point, must after all judge which idea is the most creative. The result must surely be the least fashionable and least popular, criteria which are rarely selected for, and even more rarely desirable. Sometimes, briefs or specifications for art projects request that a proposal is creative and engages the public, which is impossible. Creativity and public engagement are opposites. The more creative you are, the more out of step with median opinion. That's what being creative means.

The creative idea is any idea that differs from consensus. The more creative the idea, the more it differs from the consensus view. This also shows why creativity is related to madness because a mad idea is also an idea that differs from consensus.

This understanding has important implications for artists, as art is an industry driven by creativity. An artist must choose between a creative idea, which is unpopular, or a popular idea that is uncreative. People tend to need a degree of popularity to survive. There are many more uncreative artists successfully creating their mediocre, mainstream paintings, objects, designs, than genuinely creative artists.

One must also ask, what benefit does the supremely creative idea have, if it is unpopular with everyone? Of course, ideas and tastes change, and one important factor of art is in driving trends. Art creates new, unpopular, ideas, which become popular. This is why creativity is important, it is the embryo of the future. Change is inevitable, and the creative idea determines what things change into.