Monday, January 16, 2006
The Typology of the Creative Process
I'm fascinated by the synopsis of some key points of David W. Galenson's new book _Old Masters and Young Geniuses_ that Kyle Gann presented several days ago -- in particular with his description of the two categories "Experimental Artist" and "Conceptual Innovator." I haven't read the book, so I'm going on Kyle's description, and I'm not going to do a synopsis of Kyle's synopsis -- that would be silly -- so I suggest you go check that out before you continue here.
All set? Okay. I am inclined to believe that Galenson's categories are valid -- they apparently come straight out of the data, and they sound plausible -- but it's probably not a binary system. Most likely there's a continuum, and "Experimental Artist" and "Conceptual Innovator" are at either end. The next question, then, is what underlying dynamics create this continuum? I'm going to propose that the difference is between an artist's relative philosophical, aesthetic, or strategic focus on Innovation and Mastery. “Innovation” as I am defining it here is the drive for "progress," for finding new ways of doing things; “Mastery” is the drive for perfection, fine-tuning, maximizing the effect of some technique or style. These two drives are fundamentally opposed, in that the Innovation process of searching for new things detracts from the quantity of time and focus that can be applied to perfecting the existing methods, whereas the Mastery process of detail-work and exploration of the innate possibilities of the existing system detract from the amount of time and focus available for finding new things. This model of focusing on Mastery or Innovation is a continuum as well; or perhaps a better way to think about it is in terms of proportions. Any given artist has, say, 10 units of focus to allocate between the two categories -- some allocate 5 and 5, some allocate 1 and 9, and some are in between. (I doubt 10 and 0 is possible, since finding new ideas requres enough Mastery to figure out which ideas are good, and exploring the possibilities of the existing system requires enough Innovation to find the parts of the system that have't been fully exploited.) The advantage of thinking in terms of Innovation and Mastery is that while Experimental Artist and Conceptual Innovator tell you _how_ things are, an artist’s attitudes and resultant creative focus tell us _why_ they are that way.
If you go through each of the bullet points Kyle provides to illustrate the qualities of the Experimental Artist and the Conceptual Innovator you will find that each point can be explained in terms of the Mastery or Innovation focus. (To check my work, I went through each one and confirmed it.) For example, the Conceptual Innovator tends to have one or two major works that revolutionize the field, whereas the Experimental Artist tends to have a long series of solid works, none of which dominates his or her output. Of course if your main goal is innovation, you are going to fail many times before you finally have your breakthrough, but then once you’ve had that breakthrough and revolutionized the field, the Masters are going to move in. The Masters, having spent their time learning how to achieve mastery over a system, are going to be better than the Innovator at working out the details of the new style or technique.
Of course now we have a whole new set of questions. This continuum seems conceptually similar to various personality typing tools such as the Myers-Briggs system. Does the Innovation/Mastery axis map in any convenient way against the MBTI’s axes? And speaking of axes, should we expect the Creativity Typing system to have multiple axes as well? For instance, might the Everett Rogers Diffusion of Innovations theory apply? Might a second axis of the Creativity Type be the Innovator – Early Adopter – Early Majority – Late Majority – Laggard axis? It’s hard to imagine an Innovator (my version) who is also a Laggard, but there are certainly Masters at every point along the Everett Rogers spectrum. And finally, what causes an artist to be a Master or an Innovator or somewhere inbetween? How much of it is genetic, and how much cultural indoctrination? And how does the cultural indoctrination work?
There’s a lot of fascinating ground to cover. I hope more economists follow in Galenson’s footsteps in using the tools of economics to develop these sorts of models of artistic behavior.
posted by Galen H. Brown
2:54 PM
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