Seth Godin says anyone can be an artist. Without even becoming an artist:
Art isn’t only a painting. Art is anything that’s creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.
What makes someone an artist? I don’t think it has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren’t artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artist who works with oil paint or marble, sure. But there are artists who worked with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.
(Linchpin, Seth Godin)
He argues that the Industrial Revolution, which has shaped our culture and attitude to work for so long, has now run its course, and is in fact an aberration:
Imagine a stack of 400 quarters. Each quarter represents 250 years of human culture, and the entire stack signifies the 100,000 years we’ve had organised human tribes. Take the top quarter of the stack. This one quarter represents how many years our society has revolved around factories and jobs and the world as we see it. The other 399 coins stand for a very different view of commerce, economy, and culture. Our current view might be the new normal, but the old normal was around for a very long time.
(Linchpin, Seth Godin)
Because of the emergence of the creative economy, the factory has ” fallen apart” – creativity is now the number one economic priority and “success means being an artist”. Bad news for Lou. Great news for Jack and Marla.
Inevitably, Linchpin has provoked protests from those who believe there is something sacred about art and artists, and that calling businesspeople ‘artists’ flatters them and demeans the term:
Art is a special and élite area. So is being a NASA astronaut, a Math Professor or a wedding cake maker but that does not make these people artists. And a formally trained and educated artist can do and think about things that the vast, majority of people out there cannot do – no matter how hard you make a power-point presentation or plan a product launch.
Think about it this way – I believe that any artist can get into a business or arts program, or even an engineering program if they try hard enough. Isn’t that what those motivational posters tell us? Conversely, there are only a few people who are able to get into a Fine Arts studio program. The difference? They have a talent, and not because they are good at listening to a client and trying really hard.
(‘Uh Oh, Seth Godin Is Flatter Marketing with the Word “Art”‘, The ArtListPro blog)
Actually, the ‘artist’ bit isn’t even the most outrageous claim Godin makes in Linchpin:
You Are a Genius
No one is a genius all the time. Einstein had trouble finding his house when he walked home from work every day. But all of us are geniuses sometimes.
(Linchpin, Seth Godin)
At this point, you might expect to hear squawks of protest from Lateral Action, given that I’ve already said you don’t need to be a genius to be a creative success. But semantics aside, Seth and I are really saying the same thing: don’t put others on a lofty pedestal andthem ‘geniuses’ whom you could never hope to emulate. It may feel like modesty, but it’s actually an excuse. Michelangelo’s story shows us that the biggest differences between geniuses and the rest of us are not God-given talent and supernatural intelligence, but things like work, passion, critical thinking, courage and persistence – which are within the reach of all of us, once we commit.
Reading Linchpin reminded me of one of my favourite books about the creative process, The Art of Work by Roger Coleman, which was the inspiration for my piece about Michelangelo. Coleman is an ‘artist turned craftsman’ and Professor of Design who challenges our received assumptions about the nature of art:
The history of art is really the history of skilled work – no more, no less – and when we marvel at the products of other periods and cultures, we marvel at the achievements of a tradition of skilled work, not ‘art’.
(The Art of Work, Roger Coleman)
Earlier cultures, he argues, would not have distinguished between the artist and the craftsman — they were one and the same, no matter how accomplished or refined the work. The word ‘art’ simply meant ‘skill’ or ‘work’. Shakespeare used the word in this sense when he wrote “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face”. And according to my Oxford English Dictionary the primary meaning of the word is still “human creative skill or its application”.
For Roger Coleman, this original artistic tradition is personified in the figure of Daedalus, the fabled artisan and inventor of Greek mythology:
Daedalus is the archetypal craftsman: inventor and engineer; architect and builder; artist and sculptor; designer of labyrinths; maker of wings; problem solver and toymaker. In short, the virtuoso exponent of all that is skilful, inventive, constructive and creative.
(The Art of Work, Roger Coleman)
In other words he didn’t confine his creative energies to paint or marble. He also got his hands dirty solving problems in the real world. His work was breathtaking but not perfect – as his son Icarus found to his cost.
Like Godin, Coleman blames the Industrial Revolution for stifling this tradition of art-as-skilled-work:
It was the Industrial Revolution that finally distorted our understanding of the daedalic tradition by demanding an absolute distinction between work – labour that could be exploited in the factories and fields of the nineteenth century – and an art that was to be revered and idolised as close to genius. In its original use the word art meant skill and the exercise of skill – we still use the word in this sense – but it was only in the late nineteenth century that the words art and artist developed their modern meanings. At the same time another word – artisan – was co-opted to distinguish the skilled manual worker from the intellectual, imaginative or creative artist, and artists emerged as a very special category of cultural workers, producing a rare and marginal commodity – works of art.
(The Art of Work, Roger Coleman)
So if you feel nostalgic for the good old days, when pure artists pursued their noble calling unsullied by the world of commerce and practical problems, I hate to break it to you but that’s actually a manufactured modern myth. Not only that, the myth has served a pretty basic purpose: marketing. What better way to avoid the daily grind of the factory and get sky-high prices for your work than to persuade the world that the productions of your pen/paintbrush/chisel are the effusions of artistic genius? Nice work if you can get it.
I’m not saying individual artists are this cynical, or even this aware of what’s been happening. But I am saying that true artists can work in any medium, and that artistic types (who include me) have no right to look down their noses at those who are outstandingly “skilful, inventive, constructive and creative” in other fields of work.
What Do You Think?
Should we reserve the term ‘artist’ for those who work in the arts?
Is it possible to be an artist in business, education, childcare, construction – or other non-artistic professions?
What difference would it make to your work if you decided to approach it as an artist?
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1 2 3 4 Next »I'm reading Linchpin now and loving it. I appreciate Godin's use of the word 'artist' - anyone who moves others with their work. He's talking about bringing the artistry of the self to bear on work, and insisting that being that artist - sharing our own creative expression - is vital in today's economy.
On my first business card as a coach, I put this quotation:
"All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life." M.C. Richards
That pretty much sums it up for me - how we live is an expression of our creative gifts. The work we do can be a tangible result of our artistry, whether we're painting on a canvas or coaching someone to their brilliance.
What are you making, what change are you effecting? If you're doing something on your own initiative, chances are you're an artist.
I also very much appreciated Godin's pieces about emotional labor and resistance. The emotional labor of creating anything can be enormous - overcoming internal and external inhibitions, coming to grips with fear of failure, being brave and willing enough to step out of the tribe and do something different - these are the invisible efforts that contribute to being an artist who ships, and this work isn't often acknowledged.
I'm excited about Linchpin. I'm less concerned about clinging to a strict definition of what an artist is or isn't. Richard Florida pushed this envelope when he included lawyers and businesspeople in the 'creative class'.
I love Linchpin's call to let go of the old ways that are crumbling around us. The means of production is now in the hands of anyone who wants it - and is willing to take them up and use them.
Telling people on the ArtListPro blog that "any one of you can get into any business program, but only you special few have the talent to get into a fine arts program." And Seth is the one "flatter marketing". Okay, I'm glad they cleared that up for us.
I never thought I would find such an eveyrday topic so enthralling!
I'm with you and Seth on this one, Mark. The labels merely block people out of potential areas of interest, or they keep people in jobs that are seen as not creative from seeing how truly creative they are. I trained as an artist and I hate these sorts of labels. (Although, if you're a creative type, you'll just ignore the labels anyway and do what you want.)
You touched on something that perhaps you could expand upon. I think the primary difference between the Industrial Age and the new creative economy is critical thinking, which includes an ability to question authority. The Industrial Age with its factories depended upon its workers behaving like sheep. Our school systems are currently set up this way. I'm afraid our political system has also moved in this direction. If we want to be creative, we have to engage in critical thinking, which is going to make people following these old systems very uncomfortable.
thanks so much Mark
this post is right on. you made my day.
seth
I'm with Seth on this one. Genius is common. And artists are people who get things done. Of course from there, you need to work out if the art is for you...does it have value?
When you dance, you are, for that moment, 'a dancer', whether you're a trained one or not. When you're playing basketball you are, in that moment, 'a basketball player', whether you're in the NBA or not. (I'm a writer, and I've lost count of the number of times I've seen writer defined as 'one who writes', whether you're published or not -- which means that in order to keep being a 'writer', I have to keep writing, and publication itself is kind of beside the point.)
When you're engaged in the act of making something that didn't exist before -- making *meaning* out of something -- you're an artist. It's kind of ironic that certain people trained in the arts will complain (often rightly) that the culture doesn't appreciate them or value what they do, and then turn around and insist that what they do is so elite that only a chosen few can actually appreciate it. We appreciate and are interested in the things that have meaning for us, that are personally relevant to us, and if art-making was seen as something innate to our nature and woven into the fabric of everyday life -- as something that we simply are and do -- then maybe artists would command the kind of mainstream fascination that athletes do and the culture would be much richer for it.
Human beings *need* to be creative, and the fact that the Industrial Revolution -- and the school system it brought into being -- drummed this belief into people that only a chosen few can or should be 'creative' robs them of a dimension of living and perceiving that is our natural birthright. I love Seth's book because it brings the concept of artistry into the realm of the everyday, where it belongs -- and if certain individuals find that threatening, you have to wonder just how good they are at being 'artists' -- day-in, day-out -- in the first place.
Almost everyone I know or have ever met has a "creative" aspect to themselves, often without awareness of that label. I am in awe of those who come up with solutions to everyday problems and can implement their experience to solve, make, or communicate things that they know and can do. Everyone has gifts that can contribute to the overall beauty, creativity, and well being of the rest of us and I think we are all gradually coming to realize this. Children need the arts in school even if they never become so-called "artists." The experience will enhance their lives and help them find their own form of creativity whether it be in business, economics, science, parenting, medicine, teaching, or being a really great plumber!
Thanks so much for this post.
It is very timely for me, having just witnessed the brilliance and hard work of Leonardo da Vinci in his Anatomical Manuscripts (lent to the Vancouver Art Gallery for the 2010 Winter Olympics by The Queen's Collection until Sunday 2 May).
I was in awe of his ability to dissect, observe, sketch and annotate all that he saw. I have studied nothing quite like it in all my anatomical training. His ability to draw and describe the movement of the body was, and possibly is, unparalleled.
However, every time I speak of it, I am met with "He was such a genius!" which all but ends the conversation. No-one seems to want to discuss his life, the era and area in which he lived and worked, his seeking out of experts in their field from whom he could learn and the hours of work involved.
So I'll be sharing your post with many and referring to it whenever I now get the opportunity to counter the Genius Myth. It is such an abdication of responsibility in this modern world of Experts and Champions.
100 % agree with Seth & Mark. You know a month ago when we were forming Pakistan's first social media agency. There was one thing which was in my mind, i.e Communication is an Art (even in social media too).
Very glad to read this post. :)
@ Cynthia - Thanks, and great quotation. Yes emotional labor and Resistance are key parts of the book. Watch this space for more about Resistance on Lateral Action...
@ Drew - Thank goodness for that. ;-)
@ Mary - Excellent point about critical thinking, I hadn't looked at it that way before. It's easy to focus on the 'fresh ideas' aspect of the creative economy, but not only is critical thinking essential for creativity, it's a challenge to authoritarian structures.
@ Seth - My pleasure! Thanks for the inspiration.
@ Dennis - The value question is a big one. Is it value for the artist or the audience? Or both?
@ Justine -
Very true. And I usually find the ones who are busiest making art are the least possessive about the title of 'artist'.
@ Karen - I'm waiting for a bit of plumber's creativity in my kitchen right now. :-) You might find this piece of interest re child / adult creativity: Is Everyone Creative?
@ Emma - Yes, the 'genius' label is a sure-fire way to close down an interesting conversation. Have you seen Michael Gelb's book How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci? Highly recommended.
@ Wagas - Absolutely. Why aim low in our communication because it's 'just' social media? It's what we choose to make it. Good luck with the agency.