The main thing is the main thing.
By David MacGregor,
I have a favourite saying: Agreeing isn't thinking - it's voting.
Can't remember who I'm quoting, but it doesn't matter.
This weekend has been instructive. Bumped into a chap who once rented space from me when I ran a company with the late Paul Jeffreys (Probably better known as 'Squeeze'). It was immediately after he graduated from the design school at AUT (then ATI). We briefly spoke about Idealog. He suggested he'd have done a better job of designing the mag.
Probably…
Then I got a letter from a reader who was disappointed in what we had delivered with issue one. Really disappointed. I genuinely appreciated her feedback. In my reply I made the point that every issue is a prototype for the next. But there is something else that is important. We're not a magazine.
Conundrum? Perhaps.
Creativity has two parts. The first is concept - the idea. The second is execution. Both are crucial to success. Nature and nurture. Much of the feedback we have received has been about the execution. Bear in mind that the expression of the idea is it's skin. The bone, muscle and viscera is the idea itself.
There will be times when you love the stories we tell. Some you will feel short-changed by.
And one of the risks I personally run in communicating with the graphic arts community is that some people will think their children could execute better than I have. For what it's worth, I look back at what I've done sometimes and feel the same (my 13 year old son is very talented). The result is that we all have to keep swimming forward, keeping the oxygen flowing over our gills. That is the creative process.
It's hard.
It's worth it.
It's crucial– for all of us.
Finally. I watched the Martin Scorcese Biopic on Bob Dylan and I'm startled. At the first height of his career the crowd booed him. He was iconoclastic. Just did his own thing. As I write I am listening to Desolation Road from Highway 61 Revisited. The guy was a freakin genius. One part of the movie moved me. His liaison with Joan Baez fell away like booster rockets on a shuttle when he didn't invite her to perform onstage with him during an early english tour. She was devastated. He had moved on. Fame had caught up with him and he didn't want to share.
He says, in hindsight,
"It's hard to be wise when you're in love."
In a funny sort of way that's instructive for us all here at Idealog. We can never fall in love with what we have done, or believe our press. Oxygen has to flow over our gills. We need to push forward and explore new ideas. We have to keep the big idea in front of our minds:
New Zealand's Economy must become a creative economy with emphasis on creativity, innovation and a drive to make our number 1 export intellectual property.
How we express that idea will always be moot.
And my one true hope is that you can do it better than me.
Comments
Fenwick
Your blog made me think of how much creativity has come from adversity. Suffering those slings and arrows of outrageous criticism!
Sometimes great innovators push in a different direction from the mainstream. Sometimes great creators are not appreciated in their own lifetime. As a species we seem to enjoy maintaining the norm and critiquing anything that is not the same and only accepting it when it too becomes fashionable. (is that more a case of who said it was good rather then it being a good idea? I wonder!?)
How many people have a Dyson in their cupboard, yet the mainstream did not like his ideas at first. Wouldn’t we all love a Van Gough on the wall? How many of us listened to music our parents hated? I-pod? Yes Please!
So surely criticism is the norm for those who push the boundaries of the world around them? And is it perhaps possible that criticisms can be the fuel to drive us to make our output and our ideas work? (maybe you could explore that)
We have a tendency in the western world to put down, cut down and dismiss without reflecting on what went in to the thought, idea or design or before considering why it challenges us or offering to build upon it.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could build a creative community mindset in New Zealand that accepted and embraced the output of our peers, offering supportive critique to grow our common output?
Wouldn't this really differentiate us in the world economy? A place where, like the philosophers of ancient Greece, our minds meet in generative discourse?
Not possible? A creative Utopia? One can dream.
Marin Fenwick
www.thechangefactor.com
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