Creativity is more complex than the maps we fashion to understand it. “There being no known method from the known to the unknown,” as the narrator of James Joyce’s über-imaginative Ulysses said, ascertaining what facilitates creativity might seem like a fool’s quest. Psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s On Not Being Able to Paint, a neglected classic in the literature on the creative…
We are what we consume. We thrive on a diet of inspiring ideas, deeds, and art, and languish when we lack emotional, intellectual, and spiritual nourishment. We are being polluted every day. And it’s not just the unhygienic water or the contaminated air or the nutrient-depleted food. It’s the unprecedented amounts of mindlessness and sleaze in media, entertainment, and politics. In…
The Museum of Modern Art in New York City is currently presenting Soundings: A Contemporary Score, its first major survey of sound-based art. Most of the artworks combine both sound and visual components, but some are pure audio with nothing to see at all. As I walked through the exhibition, I began to consider and categorize the types of sounds…
