“If you imitate a person you admire, the best you can possibly hope for is to become a bad imitation of the person you admire. What you need to do instead is to locate the same level of inventiveness as the person you admire, and apply it to a new domain.”Nice quote from Donald Judd via the Jonathan Harris lecture that’s floating around.
Jonathan Harris . World Building in a Crazy World . Imitation
(via heyitsnoah)
And what’s the best way of “locating the inventiveness”? - almost certainly through the trial and error of imitation. There’s a reason guitarists, say, mostly learn by playing other people’s songs or playing along to records.
(I love Harris’ web work, as a creator he’s magnificent, but as a thinker this whole lecture was disappointingly weak: that whole tangle of contradiction around simplicity, homogenity, ‘special effects’ etc. Of course he put the obligatory “boo sucks to cynicism” bit at the end too.)
Artists (in the generic sense of “creative people”) are so frequently the worst-informed people about any creative process other than their own that I automatically ignore any general principles they draw, correctly or not, from their individual experience.
