“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”
Scott Adams
I was listening as Dave was editing one of his live shows the other evening and heard a question come up about how to define creativity. Creativity has always been something hard to nail down in my opinion. It’s subjective and too often a personal perspective, yet it is the key measurement by which all work is judged.
I’ve struggled with the concept of creativity and how to describe it for some time. As a fine art gallery owner for a number of years, finding pieces that had the ‘wow factor’ was always a challenge. I needed exceptional pieces in the gallery to keep the high-end collectors interested and the doors open. Selecting work for the gallery was more art than science. I always hated to turn down an artist or photographer because their work wasn’t creative enough. I toiled with how to let them down without hurting their feelings, only to realize that I was doing them a disservice to send them out without trying to explain why their work wasn’t measuring up.
I began watching collectors and studying their behavior in an effort to better define creativity. What I found was that no matter the genre, great work was like a magnetic drawing people in. It didn’t matter whether they collected photography, abstract paintings or bronze sculptures; a collector would glance around the room, spot a piece that ‘spoke to them’ and immediately move to get a closer view.
I remember a conversation I had with an abstract artist friend of ours in the early days of the gallery that influenced my thoughts about creativity more than anything else. I was finding it difficult to select abstract pieces to carry in the gallery. I hate to admit it, but so many of them looked alike to me. I couldn’t pick out a sellable piece to save my life. So I was like a sponge when it came to learning what was collectable and what was not. My friend shared with me that most work is ‘flat and soulless,’ from his perspective. It’s simply ordinary. ‘What you need to look for is something that speaks to you,’ he said.
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