Kids Really Just Want to Play with the Box

I admire the imagination behind this idea, although I do have to say that you could create the same gift package yourself instead of buying a kit. Just need some ribbons, and construction paper, glitter, glue and maybe make up some instructions for a few different box toys. Voila!

The Uselessness of Anything That Won't Make You Rich

From Animal comes a biting commentary on a recent article in The Daily Beast which lists arts as among the most "useless" college majors.

So put down your easels and notebooks and get to… Mining and Mineral Engineering, Metallurgical Engineering, Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration and, uh, Petroleum Engineering. That’s what you should be doing because, clearly, whether your college education is ”useless” or not is measurable by yearly income only, and not the graduate’s contribution to society or self-fulfillment. If you’re not good at math, too bad.

Treasure Hunt Fashion

The Detroit "Maker Culture"

"As a city, we’ve been a maker culture since the beginning. When the city was still flourishing, we were a part of making—the hands on production of automobiles, clothing, shoes, and leather goods. We were so tangible. Some of the best goods came out of Michigan, and Detroit in particular, and I think that’s so deeply ingrained in all the generations. The grandfather did cars, and from there, the sons and daughters made products that other places in the country didn’t have the skills to do. Detroit was raised by, and into it. It’s part of everyone’s being—we are a community and city based on producing things.... You can’t blame the city, but we’ve been doing it for 20-or so years now, which is longer than the crash. We need to apply new structures and new systems to it, because right now, the old one does not work. The old paradigm for making and producing no longer applies. In order to succeed, we need to think of new ways. This is where the idea of the artist comes in."-Veronika Scott, metro Detroit artist quoted in Bad at Sports

Imagine a World that Rewards Creation Instead of Greed

Imagine the clouds dripping.
Dig a hole in your garden to
put them in. -Yoko Ono

Imagine a world in which social status was achieved by creating the most value.  By value I do not mean financial wealth-- that is a measure of how much you can take.  It is easy to measure profits in digits and so it is easy to celebrate the bank or corporation that has the largest profits.  

What if we were as consistent in measuring what an organization created?  We like to believe that the business that does the best work in the world receives the greatest rewards, and yet the work in the world is not what we measure.  What kind of "taking-stock exchange" would we create to tally the most creative corporations and banks?  ("Creative" meaning those that create the most, not the most innovative in finding ways to accumulate profits.)

What if the bank that helped fund the most innovative companies-- that enabled the most great ideas to thrive-- what if this bank was viewed as the most successful?  What if its CEOs and Presidents were the most admired and most emulated?  What would it take for us to change our definition of success to value creating over taking?  

Imagine if the individual with the greatest social status was not the one who could buy the most stuff, but the one who had done the best job bringing things into the world-- funding or making art, teaching the most scientists or funding the research with the most breakthroughs, funding the companies that had the most revolutionary impact on society.  What if we held the creator in the highest esteem and saw a big house and a car as simply things-- neither good or bad in themselves?  What if we thought of power not in terms of political sway or the ability to hire people-- but in terms of the ability to effect positive change in the world?  If we operated under these assumptions, what would the world be like?  Who would be our heroes?  How would business and the economy change?  Can you imagine this world?  How vividly can you imagine it? 

 

Wealthy Poets: The Riches of the Artistic Life

Over at The Life Poetic, a fellow writer, Sage Cohen, puts the "broke and beautiful" life in poetic terms arguing that "starving poets" should stop buying into the notion that artists are supposed to struggle and that less money equals less wealth. (Remember the origin of the world "wealth" is simply "well being" and you don't need money to have it.)

If we don’t question the popular paradigm that aligns “wealth” with money and we make the pursuit of cash a primary goal, we may find that we have little time left over for poetry. And on the flip side, if we neglect our material needs in pursuit of a life poetic, we are likely to end up in real, uninspiring distress.

But if we agree that a prosperous life is one with time to literally and figuratively smell the roses, and then luxuriate in the time to write about it, then we are establishing a root system for a new “poetry of prosperity” — one which we feed and water with our attention and our words. By recognizing, welcoming and prioritizing both our material and creative needs, we have a far better chance of striking a balance that feels like true wealth and can sustain us over the long term.

While you're at it, you can visit Cohen's blog at Writing the Life Poetic.

Consumerism vs. Creativity

The premise of Broke is Beautiful is that the cash strapped life is the creative life. Further support for this concept comes from the blog 99% which has an article Is Consumerism Killing Our Creativity. The article argues that we're using up our creative impulses in the pursuit of bargains and stuff.

The consumerist search capitalizes on the same “seeking” part of the brain that fuels the creative rush. Of course, while consumerism can serve as an addictive substitute for the stimulation of creative activity, it offers nowhere near the same reward in the long term.

...No external thing can prompt creativity, and there’s no substitute for just getting down to doing the work. In fact, it’s been proven that hardship – being deprived of things – stimulates creativity more than being well-off. A recent Newsweek article on America's declining creativity reported:

“Highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.”

For more on the subject of creation and consumerism, see my article from last week: Is Art What You Do or What You Consume.




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Is Art What You Do, or What You Consume?

For most of human history artistic production consisted of telling stories or dancing or singing songs within a community, around the fire, at church gatherings. Anyone who wished to participate could, and stories evolved in the telling, music gained verses as it moved from community to community. Tales took on a collective richness and who they "belonged to" and exactly who had "created" them was fluid and a bit vague.

As I wrote in Broke is Beautiful:

These days we’ve become accustomed to the idea that entertainment is something you consume, not something you make. We buy records, we rent DVDs and generally leave imagination to the professionals. Much of modern life, in fact, seems to be a rebellion against daydreaming. We listen radio on the way to and from work; we switch on the TV the minute we get home. There are now even screens to entertain us in restaurants and at the gas pump, as if we would become so bored in the five minutes it takes to pump gas that we would just give up and go home. They should know that’s never going to happen. That’s what iPods are for.

How are we ever to find a moment for quality daydreaming with the CNN airport network and the CNN grocery store check-out line network and CNN monitors at the post office? Recent surveys show that children everywhere now spend up to 80 percent of their free time outside of school watching television. Not surprisingly kids who are heavy TV viewers are less imaginative than children who watch only one hour a day. We no longer value our own fantasies; we pay other people to show us theirs.

I came across another example of this in a fascinating article in The New Republic, Ellen Handler Spitz reviews a new collection of Grimm's Fairy Tales called "The Grimm Reader." She points out that the movement from stories as oral tradition to written form made them static.

Fairy tales were originally recited aloud, and that format gave the listeners considerable power. They were able to exercise a direct and partially controlling effect on each recounting. If attention waned, stories were modified. They could be spiced, embellished, or curtailed. But contemporary American adults rarely tell fairy tales to children anymore. We read, slavishly adhering to a text. Such reliance denotes a diminished narrative inventiveness among us, even a dereliction in regards to the sacred task of passing on our cultural heritage.

We have internalized the idea that art is a product created by talented professionals, and forgotten about the community tradition in art so thoroughly that we think of Internet media that allow broad amateur participation and two way and collective communication as new and novel.




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Philippe Petit On... I'm Not Sure What

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Philippe Petit
www.colbertnation.com
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This is an older clip from The Colbert Report featuring Philippe Petit. I found his adventure to walk on a tight rope between the twin towers, as recounted in Man on Wire, inspirational, and he is used as an example of making creativity a priority in Broke is Beautiful. This interview was a fairly absurdist. It is here because at one point Petit espouses a "broke is beautiful" philosophy by explaining that he is from another planet and doesn't understand money. Enjoy.

Broke is Beautiful Quote of the Day

Visionary entrepreneur Paul Hawken knows why Octavio has launched a successful enterprise and will keep it growing. In Growing a Business, he points out, “With low overhead, frugal means and fragile budgets, you can’t buy your way out of problems. You have to learn your way out. The creativity and tenacity you have to develop will make it hard for you to be put out of business.”

From Joyfully Jobless

Broke and Beautiful Person of the Day

Marisa (I assume that is her name from the comments on her "about me" blurb) is a life expermiment blogger a la Julie and Julia. Her stunt? Wear a brand new dress each day spending only $1 each day ($365 a year) in thrift shops.

Her blog New Dress A Day shows what can be done with a small budget and a big imagination combined with serious sewing skills. Many of those stained or hopelessly out of fashion duds were most likely destined for the skip. If more of us were able to literally re-fashion our clothes like this, we'd need to pound out much less stuff and we'd have less waste. We'd also look much more individual and unique. That's the Broke is Beautiful spirit at work.

If you like Project Runway, you'll become a fan of New Dress A Day. She shows you the before and after photos of the clothes as well as some notes on the conversion process.

Video of the Day: The Uniform Project

The Uniform Project Trailer from The Uniform Project on Vimeo.

Idea of the Day: Free Self-Generating Public Lighting for the Third World

From Igendesign, which is a duo of Hungarian design students, comes an idea for how to light dangerously dark streets in poor areas using wind power and bamboo.

Ode to Creativity

The Practical in the Impractical

According an article in the current edition of The American Scholar, the number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically; the same is true of philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and history.

Meanwhile business has become, by far, the most popular major in the nation’s colleges and universities with more than twice the majors of any other course of study.

William M. Chace, the article's author, argues that changes in the teaching of humanities are largely to blame, but he also lists that the rising cost of a college education as a culprit:

In an educational collapse of this magnitude, other forces must also be at play. The first of these is the surging growth of public higher education and the relatively slower growth of private colleges and universities.

During the most recent period for which good figures are available (from 1972 to 2005), more young people entered the world of higher education than at any time in American history. Where did they go? Increasingly into public, not private, schools. In the space of that one generation, public colleges and universities wound up with more than 13 million students in their classrooms while private institutions enrolled about 4.5 million. Students in public schools tended toward majors in managerial, technical, and pre-professional fields while students in private schools pursued more traditional and less practical academic subjects...private schools have until now been the most secure home of the humanities. But today even some liberal arts colleges are offering fewer courses in the liberal arts and more courses that are “practical.”

...an obvious external cause: money. With the cost of a college degree surging upward during the last quarter century—tuition itself increasing far beyond any measure of inflation—and with consequent growth in loan debt after graduation, parents have become anxious about the relative earning power of a humanities degree.

Our cultural trend towards measuring the value of education almost entirely in terms of earning potential is something I have discussed in my sister blog dedicated to my ballet business. Last September, in an article titled A Question of Arts Education, I wrote:

One of the arguments that is often put forward for arts funding is that studying the arts improves performance in other academic areas. For example, music increases math proficiency. Why do we resort to this argument instead of arguing that arts education increases art proficiency?

We are, perhaps, used to making economic arguments for educaton. Go to school, get an education, and you'll make more money over the course of your life. We're hard pressed to argue that years of focus on ballet or poetry will increase someone's earning potential.

And why is a philosopher, poet, musician or dancer likely to have a lower income? Here we get back to the Rand study (Cultivating Demand for the Arts), which argues that we don't fund arts because we didn't learn their value in school.

As I noted in an article in that blog last December, Former National Endowment for the Arts chairman Bill Ivey told the Utne Reader, that he is concerned that Americans have become consumers of art rather than creators.

"We feel that sports are invigorated when many people can play at many levels. While we understand that amateur basketball players are not going to be as good as a superstar, there’s no sense that they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing. But in the arts, around the fourth or fifth grade, we find people who have special talent, we separate them, give them special attention, and create some terrific artists who serve society—but we tend to denigrate the amateur."

Ivey, for one, believes that artists could be a much more important part of the economy. "If we’re talking about a new sewage disposal system, there should be an artist on that panel; there should be artists on school boards and neighborhood commissions, not to make the project look pretty, but to bring a unique approach. Artists are very good at metaphor, at seeing less-obvious links, at right-brain thinking that might not be linear but that gets you to a good result by making an imaginative leap."

What do you think? Is the decline in enrollment in humanities courses a problem and, if so, what are the potential solutions? By seeing the arts as "impractical" are we missing out on practical applications of artists unique perspective in our communities?

Random Blog of the Day

From time to time I hit the "next blog" navigation tool to see what random blog appears. Today's fun find is:YOUR STUDIO BLOG. Its proprietor is fascinated by artists' work spaces. The site is a collection of photos of such spaces.

An Act of Imagination

Sojourners Magazine, an online publication with a mission to "articulate the biblical call to social justice," features an article by Danny Duncan Collum on a new Poor People's campaign. Duncan writes:

The campaign, made up of more than 90 organizations around the country, aims to “unite the poor across color lines as the leadership base for a broad movement to abolish poverty … through advancing economic human rights as named in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, such as the rights to food, housing, health, education, communication and a living wage job.”

...They seem to be picking up the banner of the Poor People’s Campaign that fell after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968...

...presidents don’t change the world. People do. Presidents are pulled along behind great waves of popular uprising. That’s what happened during our last Great Depression, and Franklin Roosevelt knew it. That’s why he once famously told a group of progressive activists that he agreed with their proposal. “Now,” he said, “go make me do it.” And that’s what happened again in the 1960s when the civil rights movement forced President Kennedy to become a better man than he ever meant to be...

The Poor People’s Campaign meeting I attended this summer focused on the role of artists in a grassroots movement for economic human rights. Again, looking back at those two great periods of social change in the 20th century, they both were accompanied by a renaissance of popular art. Writers, artists, actors, painters, and photographers all had a place in the New Deal and the labor movement that fueled it. In the 1960s, African-American religion and music fueled the civil rights movement and all the ripples of social change it inspired. Acting for a better world requires, first and foremost, an act of imagination. You have to see the potential for change—in yourself and in your community...

Hobos Lullaby (2007 Remastered LP Version) - Emmylou Harris

Stefan Sagmeister: The power of time off

From the TED Talks video podcast. TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become broader. In this talk, designer Stefan Sagmeister discusses closing his New York studio for a yearlong sabbatical to rejuvenate and refresh their creative outlook.

Creativity and Constraints

Much of the time when we use the word "creativity" we're actually talking about "imagination" or "originality." The difference between these terms can be found right in the word. To be "creative" you have to create. Imagination is only a first step.

To let your imagination roam free, you need to let go of your pre-conceptions, limiting beliefs and constraints. But for creativity you need to welcome useful constraints back in. The right kind of constraint can provide the framework for innovative creation. This is good news for the broke among us. Limited resources are a great constraint that can force you to be more innovative with what you've got.

Today, over at Boing Boing, is a review of the book Junky Styling: A manual for thrift-shop clothes remixers. It is written by the proprietors of London's Junky Styling, a clothing boutique that takes thrift-store finds and re-imagines and re-constructs them into one-of-a-kind fashion statements. It just goes to show that buying second hand doesn't mean you have to abandon fashion or resign yourself to being out of date. With a little creativity-- and a sewing machine-- your budgetary constraint can be the springboard to an entirely original you.

Follow the link above to read more about the store's proprietors on Boing Boing or visit the Junky Styling web page.