Earlier this week, Lateral Action - one of my favourite blogs about creativity and making a living off of it - had a post that discussed Elizabeth Gilbert's recent talk at the TED conference.
Elizabeth Gilbert is the bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love. Her talk was about the enormous pressure put on creative types to produce good work, and her suggested method of dealing with this. Gilbert takes the audience back to before the Enlightenment when people believed that artists had a daemon, or a genius, that lived inside their studios and gave their work a creative flair. The result of this thinking was that all creative works were a collaborative effort between the artist and his external genius. At some point, the idea of the genius was internalized, and artists started being referred to as geniuses, and the work was no longer a collaborative effort, but a solitary undertaking.
Gilbert argues that this puts an inordinate amount of pressure on artists and creatives to produce good work, and that by returning to the idea of an external genius, artists can relieve some of that pressure. The artist's role becomes to simply produce. How good the end result is largely the role of the genius. All the artist can do is create, and if a piece does not turn out, it is simply because the genius did not show up that day.
I have to admit, the idea appealed to me for about a split second after I finished watching the clip. No more agonizing over bad work? I'm sold! Unfortunately, once I started to mull it over, I decided that the idea of an external genius was wholly unsatisfactory to me.
First off, buying into this idea does require a certain extent of belief in divine intervention. Even if the genius is not strictly a deity, or a spirit, there is something mystical about it. If you believe in that kind of mysticism, then that idea is fine. However, if you don't generally believe that sort of thing, then choosing to project all your creativity onto an external genius is simply an act of self-delusion. It becomes a conscious choice to create something apart from yourself that will carry all of this responsibility. The moment you make that conscious choice, you are defeating the whole purpose of the genius. The responsibility of a thing that you have created is ultimately your responsibility, therefore bringing you back to square one.
The second issue I have with Gilbert's idea is that the whole notion of putting less pressure on the artist feels like a cop out. Creating something is not an easy task, and no one expects it to be. However, that doesn't mean that the person who tries and fails to create something good should not take responsibility for that failure. I have often said that failure is part of the process, and in order to take advantage of it, you need to own up to it and accept it. Blaming your external genius for your bad work is too easy, and creating isn't supposed to be easy.
Tied to that point, is the opposite perspective. Gilbert also says that accepting an external genius is a good way to prevent an artist from getting arrogant, because he can't take full responsibility for his success. While that may be true, I think the better way to prevent an artist from getting arrogant is to remind him of all the failures it took before he achieved success. Besides, creating something good and having success with it is possibly one of the best feelings in the world. Why would anyone want to give that up?
If we take away the responsibility for the quality of the artist's work, and leave him only with the responsibility to produce, then creating becomes as mundane as digging ditches. Successes and failures, peaks and valleys, are what make anything in life enjoyable. Everything that is enjoyable in creating, the energy put into making something good, is lost the moment you give that responsibility to someone else. A writer becomes just a typist. A photographer might as well just use a point and shoot disposable camera. A painter is just putting colours on a canvass.
Now that I've wailed against Elizabeth Gilbert, I will say that despite my dislike of the notion of an external genius, I agree with what I believe to be her underlying point. Gilbert's entire talk, in my view, is a roundabout way of saying that for any artist to succeed, what he needs to do is produce. Everything else is a secondary consideration, because no matter how much talent, genius or whatever you have, none of it matters unless you produce.
Then again, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote an international bestseller, and I'm still trying to figure this whole creativity thing out, so what do I know?
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