Given some time to mull over Kevin Kelly's vision for literature, Heather Green at BusinessWeek's Blogspotting articulates something I couldn't quite spit out about the relationship between art and artist.
On NPR, [John] Updike's response to this suggestion (of authors as performers) was: Listen, you don't want to talk to most authors. They do their best work alone and most are actually inarticulate when it comes to conversing. They are authors because they can write, not because they can talk.
The problem to me, reading over Kelly's article, is how he presents how creative types are supposed to respond. It's a typical example, in my mind, of the standard reply that people in the digital world give to other people when we don't know what the model will be for creative works: Oh, You're creative. Perform.
Creative work must be accepted on the artist's terms or at some point it ceases to be art and becomes, rather, a command performance. Paint! Sing! Write! Dance!
Wayne
Technorati Tags: books, creativity, imagination
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