Thank you. I was going to suggest that it would be useful to hear from teachers and students of "creativity" courses. It would be interesting to hear what the teachers thought they had helped their students discover and what the students thought they had learned.
Robert, what can any teacher say other than justify his job, such as it is? Yet, as you suggest, it would indeed by nice to hear them go about it.
As for the 'students', they paid their money... few people are willing to admit to their follies.
I think if you watch one of the William Klein videos where he talks about his life post-WW2, studying art in Paris on a US Army grant, you realise that the artist is already there - all the learning-at-the-foot-of does is fulfil the rôle of art school, to which I imagine few non-artists have a snowball's of entering. At least, up until the end of the honest 50s, that's how it ran in Glasgow and Dundee! Without Higher Art and English, forget it; learn about bricks and cement instead.
As far as I can see, this idea about 'everybody can do everything' is a modern phenomenon that's cousin to the ethic that everybody's a winner, that there are no seconds and thirds, and that shame must attend anyone not capable of everything. How silly! We are who and what we are:
individuals, with different abilties and failings, each of us distinct from the other, however much we think we may have in common through human heritage.
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Posted by: Isaac
« on: February 10, 2016, 06:45:23 PM »
Insert Quote
Quote from: Telecaster on February 10, 2016, 04:31:51 PM
I don't get why some of y'all are so determined to attribute creativity solely to "innate talent" …
A way to regard ourselves as special?
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Isaac, that's somewhat forced, is it not?
Nothing about being 'special' at all; everything about being the person we are rather than the range of ones we magine we
could be if we but wanted.
I see nothing self-aggrandizing about being an artist (as in
photographer): it's no better, and probably no worse than being a musician, a carpenter or a chef. We have to be someone - be the person we genuinely happen to be. As the old man on the doorstep in Michael Jackson's video
The Way You Make Me Feel says: you can't be nobody else; may as well be yourself.
Rob