Comments on: Cultural innovation: How many producing stations do we have?

By: Skeptikos

Skeptikos — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 12:10:20 +0000

“But here the thing that really stuns me. I am told by reliable authorities that there are now lots of people who genuinely do not care if their creativity is ever witnessed by any one other than a small circle of friends. Not only do they not care if they are ever discovered, they devoutly wish to avoid discovery. Creative, talented, accomplished, they never record their work. Some of it rises to genius, and then its gone. It changes constantly, but who would know. These strange people are the creatively solipsistic. They trust only in their own existence. Bless them, pity them, I dont know. But apparently we now have so much creativity we can just throw some of it away.”

May I introduce you to to Buddhism, one of the largest and oldest philosophies of Man?

Specifically sand paintings: http://www.ackland.org/art/exhibitions/buddhistart/construction.htm

It is interesting that someone like yourself would be stunned that those of us who do, in order to DO, are so unique. I pay my bills with science, but I pay my soul (not a religous comment, my “soul” is merely the fact that I am greater than the sum of my parts) with my art. Yes, I have sold stories for cash, yes I have sold photos, yes I have sold sculpture. But those things I do for the same reason I backpack and climb mountians. BECAUSE LIFE IS FOR LIVING. Cash is nice, but so is shrimp. Obsession with rewards indicates a developmental disability.

Do you really only maintain this site for the currency rewards?

By: Scott McArthur

Scott McArthur — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 11:07:50 +0000

Rufus Wainright is a probably the most creative anglo musican to have recently come out of Montreal. But can we call him a Montrealer? He was already a being above ‘location’ as a child and I believe he currently lives in a San Francisco-Montreal-Manhattan triangle.
He wasn’t even mentioned in the Spin article. Not their audience. His music is sophisticated rather than cool. And Spin is all about the cool of this moment. Yawn.

By: chris

chris — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 07:54:01 +0000

i live in montreal. the music scene here is sickly and corrupt. there’s no sound and only one good band, and it isn’t the arcade fire. check out the NY times listing of “up and coming montreal bands”, then listen to the ones that haven’t broken up before the article was written. you’ll see what i mean. there’s nothing here.

this is about pitchforkmedia and its ability to turn bands into media darlings overnight based on the superficial whims of its reviewers

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 03:09:22 +0000

I think your approach to the question betrays an attachment to the old way of looking at the situation. Even as you champion the joys of mining the local scenes in “obscure” places like Montreal (?) and Seattle (??) and Atlanta (????!!!??) your comments still seem to center on the judgments of tastemakers in Places That Matter (ie New York and Los Angeles). Not that I have anything against New York (LA is another story) but it seems to me that the whole point of these developments is that these places are no longer necessarily the centers of Culture for the North American market. Indeed, arguably we’ve progressed beyond the need for any such centers.

The wonderful thing about it is that we don’t have to wait for Montreal to become tedious…we can have all the others right now. We’re witnessing the death throes of mass culture, and all I have to say is that it’s about damn time! Thanks to those marvelous improvements in communication technology, we’re rapidly approaching the point where each of us can select a cultural mix based on personal taste…not only free (if we want to be) of the dominance of NY and LA, but unconstrained by our own geographic circumstances. The market for culture has moved almost completely to a post-scarcity model.

Matthew Arnold and his begging-the-question definition of culture can bite me, too.

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 22:42:20 +0000

I don’t think that NY/LA create the most musical talent. There is too much to do there, too much competition. The best genuinely original music comes from kids in small towns in the midwest and the south who have nothing better to do. They’re bored and forced to be creative. They come to New York eventually if they have talent (although this too may die down if you are right about technology) — but the best musical acts are not from the big city. They are from Tupelo, Mississippi, or Liverpool, or Montreal, or Minneapolis — big enough to have an audience, but far enough away from the capitals to be able to be genuinely creative.