Linkblog
It’s a concept that remains with us today: painters, novelists and composers are still regarded with a penumbra of awe, and none of us ever pauses to think that even the humblest nut and bolt was at some point the product of human creativity, too.
Art, almost by definition, doesn’t function: it may decorate our lives and enlarge our minds and provide spiritual pleasure and enlightenment, but does it really deserve the sacred status that its association with “creativity” gives it?
As a society, we have arrived at a false valuation of the creative artist, with wildly excessive rewards for some of those who write novels or paint portraits (£20 million for a Lucien Freud?) and an education system that expends disproportionate time and energy encouraging and sponsoring people to become, in effect, day-dreamers.
Instead, we should be investing more respect and money in the acquisition of ordinary skills and practical crafts that would allow us to take more control of our own lives. “The hand is the window to the mind,” said the philosopher Kant, and the same relationship should be acknowledged as the hub of creativity, too.
(This content has been aggregated from a source and author external to this site. Read up on the practice of linkblogging and my use of it here. Authors and publishers are welcome to contact me.)
May 6, 2008
It’s a concept that remains with us today: painters, novelists and composers are still regarded with a penumbra of awe, and none of us ever pauses to think that even the humblest nut and bolt was at some point the product of human creativity, too.
Art, almost by definition, doesn’t function: it may decorate our lives and enlarge our minds and provide spiritual pleasure and enlightenment, but does it really deserve the sacred status that its association with “creativity” gives it?
As a society, we have arrived at a false valuation of the creative artist, with wildly excessive rewards for some of those who write novels or paint portraits (£20 million for a Lucien Freud?) and an education system that expends disproportionate time and energy encouraging and sponsoring people to become, in effect, day-dreamers.
Instead, we should be investing more respect and money in the acquisition of ordinary skills and practical crafts that would allow us to take more control of our own lives. “The hand is the window to the mind,” said the philosopher Kant, and the same relationship should be acknowledged as the hub of creativity, too.
The Arts Column – Telegraph
