the creative machine

Despite an ongoing societal love affair with creativity and ‘creative inspiration’, much of the act (the process) of making art in our consumer world has become comparable to snowmaking in the arctic.

By which I mean, isn’t there enough genuine, unique, thoughtfully created art in the world (as there is snow, in the arctic) to satisfy our ‘art needs’, without an incessant mass production of inferior product?

From corporate marketing to personal home-decorating, a standardized creation of boilerplate ‘pretty’ images for social-media posting, or wholesale purchasing of mass-produced, ‘designer art’ (intended for office or home decoration), has become the default practice for meeting an organization’s requisite ‘creativity’ goal or one’s ‘personal styling’ agenda.

This is commodity art; extensively re-produced, stock-style and banal.

And whereas the machinery that produces ‘commodity art’ is a nod to creativity, creative problem solving and process (assembly lines are, after all, efficient, clever and innovative in their own way), wide-spread, mass-assembling machinations of creativity provide nothing more than a conveyor of meaningless production; the creation of bland, over designed rubbish headed toward an ever-growing heap of homogenized art so accessible it’s taken for granted.

If every one of us took five minutes to create a piece of art for ourselves; a few moments to commit a simple drawing, thought, idea or poem to paper how might our impression of process, production and final product alter?

If we were all given the power to create instead of consume, what would change?

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