Criticism vs. Creativity
I am a critic. I write critical reviews of music and other things for an alternative weekly. I would very much like to be more of a creative person as well. My critical mind prevents me from creating much as I worry about how my creative output will be criticised.
I don't think I'm alone.
This is a strange conundrum. I know what's good. I'm paid to think, know and write about what makes something good or bad, valuable or worthless. Being that I spend an inordinate amount of time contemplating the aesthetic value of other people's creative output I recognize a number of things with regard to my own creativity.
Thinking and writing critically isn't easy. It requires certain basic skills that I don't believe many people possess. These are skills that I think you can't develop without exercising some faculties that aren't easy to quantify. How do you determine if someone is a good empath? If someone is good at juding things while being aware of his/her own personal interests? How can anyone be sure that a judgment made is a pure one?) But at the same time, it's hard to just call criticism an art. I think it is creative in some respects but it's not in a lot of other ways too.
Creating things that are supposed to have inherent aesthetic values is a difficult thing. Anyone can produce "artistic" output but it's very difficult to actually make something that is beautiful or sublime.
So maybe it's a form of stagefright. How does the critic produce and why? How does someone whose job it is to qualitatively analyze a product by assigning it a value handle producing something that will inevitably be criticized (and probably with greater scrutiny) itself? How does a (relatively in my case) analytic mind go about subduing that analytic nature enough to believe that he or she is capable of making something that is valuable?
It's a hard thing to do, and as a good friend of mine said recently, "It's the creative writer's job to not care what other people think."
I find this funny largely because it seems to me that as a critical thinker/writer, it's also my job not to care what other people think about something I'm criticizing. I suppose the issue in the end is not so much that I worry about what others may think of what I create but that I worry about what I will think of my own output.
The simple fact of the matter is that I often feel that I'm not a good writer, which I think is a good reason, if not excuse, for my less than prolific output. Strange, considering that, as a critic you have to be confident that you know what's good and you have to be enough of an elitist to believe that your opinion is valuable, often with no actual proof or basis. So you're basically an elitist with low self-esteem. I'm an eltist with no self-esteem? How does that make any sense?
I don't think I'm alone.
This is a strange conundrum. I know what's good. I'm paid to think, know and write about what makes something good or bad, valuable or worthless. Being that I spend an inordinate amount of time contemplating the aesthetic value of other people's creative output I recognize a number of things with regard to my own creativity.
Thinking and writing critically isn't easy. It requires certain basic skills that I don't believe many people possess. These are skills that I think you can't develop without exercising some faculties that aren't easy to quantify. How do you determine if someone is a good empath? If someone is good at juding things while being aware of his/her own personal interests? How can anyone be sure that a judgment made is a pure one?) But at the same time, it's hard to just call criticism an art. I think it is creative in some respects but it's not in a lot of other ways too.
Creating things that are supposed to have inherent aesthetic values is a difficult thing. Anyone can produce "artistic" output but it's very difficult to actually make something that is beautiful or sublime.
So maybe it's a form of stagefright. How does the critic produce and why? How does someone whose job it is to qualitatively analyze a product by assigning it a value handle producing something that will inevitably be criticized (and probably with greater scrutiny) itself? How does a (relatively in my case) analytic mind go about subduing that analytic nature enough to believe that he or she is capable of making something that is valuable?
It's a hard thing to do, and as a good friend of mine said recently, "It's the creative writer's job to not care what other people think."
I find this funny largely because it seems to me that as a critical thinker/writer, it's also my job not to care what other people think about something I'm criticizing. I suppose the issue in the end is not so much that I worry about what others may think of what I create but that I worry about what I will think of my own output.
The simple fact of the matter is that I often feel that I'm not a good writer, which I think is a good reason, if not excuse, for my less than prolific output. Strange, considering that, as a critic you have to be confident that you know what's good and you have to be enough of an elitist to believe that your opinion is valuable, often with no actual proof or basis. So you're basically an elitist with low self-esteem. I'm an eltist with no self-esteem? How does that make any sense?
posted by The Transit Nomad at Monday, October 03, 2005
1 Comments:
You are already bridging the gap between criticism and creativity. You create critiques by criticizing creations. Apparently you already care little about what others think about the creations you criticize, now you need only care little about what others think about your criticism of other creations, because that criticism is your creation. Speaking of which, above you will find a creation that has herein been critiqued, so start by caring nothing about what I just said. Oops, that was somewhat of a logical nullifier; sorry about that. ha ha :-)
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