Sally Mann

Ah, good taste, what a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness. -Pablo Picasso, painter and sculptor (1881-1973)

For a few years now, people have commented that there is an overall decline in creativity in fashion and there’s a lot of anxiety around whether young generations are capable of producing surprises. Is the idea that fashion can no longer produce anything original, or any ‘shocks of the new’, justified?

It’s just whining. What’s stopping them from creating something exciting? Work, don’t cry. I am optimistic, and I don’t subscribe to this idea of cultural or creative decline. Our generation has so many opportunities, so many possibilities for creation and communication, and yet seems to be intimidated by these new developments at the same time. The internet has accelerated everything; it has disrupted every industry. I would prefer to see this as an exciting and productive challenge and not the harbinger of the end of everything. This is history in the making: it is the start of something new.

 Ryan McGinley

Do you think it’s possible to be avant-garde and commercial? Or are art and commerce mutually exclusive?

 

Today, anyone who is making work and considers themselves to be ‘avant-garde’ is most likely funded by a liquor company, no? What I mean is that this is notion of artist’s disregarding the commercial is simply rhetorical. For me the most avant-garde, or simply the most creative act these days is to develop business models that sustain intelligent and original content, specifically in a digitised world. The question is, how is ‘creative freedom’ possible when everything is monetised? Rather than resisting that question under the premise that art and money are somehow at odds, what is more interesting is to attempt to answer it.

From an interview in Industrie magazine with creative director, editor-in-chief and co-founder of 032c magazine, Joerg Koch.

embrace failure

Milton Glaser - on the fear of failure
from the Berghs' Exhibition 11
on vimeo 

 via we<3it

Willy Ronis

Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts. -Leo Rosten, author (1908-1997)

Paolo Roversi

Creativity

Creativity is the basis of self-expression. Why are some people supposedly more creative than others, and why can't others open themselves up enough to be able to express who they are?

Creation is the birth of something, and something cannot come from nothing. When someone creates something: a painting, a poem, a photograph, the creativity comes from an idea, from a feeling, from emotion, or from a combination of ideas, feelings and emotions that are somehow 'reborn' from all our experiences and perspectives.

Creativity is the desire to express ourselves. To formulate these expressions, we have to draw from our reservoir of experience, dreams, desires and experimentation and mix together what was, what is, and what could be... I don't think you can learn it, it is rather something that evolves. Your perception of everything in your life fills up this reservoir.

Some people are drawn to create and express themselves, others are drawn to reflect, to analyze. But in the end, they all could be creative if they had the desire to explore the way in which they are integrated in the world of their experiences. Because creativity is really a rebirth, a true tone we feel for ourselves and for our world. Then our work becomes a real part of who we are. Maybe all this is a question of how deep we are willing to go...

by Peter Lindbergh

with Lily, New York, June 1996

Lehnert & Landrock

“The great Western disease is, ‘I’ll be happy when… When I get the money. When I get a BMW. When I get this job.’ Well, the reality is, you never get to when. The only way to find happiness is to understand that happiness is not out there. It’s in here. And happiness is not next week. It’s now.”

- Marshall Goldsmith

Ryan McGinley

  

“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.”  Lao Tzu