I Love You, David Byrne, But You're Wrong
David Byrne says he’s going to leave New York if the 1% succeeds in squeezing the creativity out of NYC. I have a different perspective. Maybe the problem isn’t that young people don’t have opportunities to create spectacular art, but rather that those with more experience have stopped learning how to see the new mediums and subjects.
I have to start by saying that I love David Byrne. The soundtrack of my life is full of his work in ways that could fill a book. That’s why his piece struck me so hard. Lots of people sent it to me to ask my opinion, so here it is. Do I think it’s true that New York is squeezing the artistic genius out of people? No, actually, I don’t. Quite the opposite.
Byrne starts off by announcing that he’s writing from Venice, a “case study in the complete transformation of a city.” At one time, Venice was the most powerful city in Europe, a leader across multiple areas, like New York, Byrne points out. My husband and I just went to Venice, where we had the same conversation. We run a creative consultancy, Science House, in Manhattan. He’s an inventor and I’m a futurist who specializes in collaboration. We spend our lives focused on ways to contribute to the ongoing economic and cultural health of the city and the world that we love.
Business hubs, Byrne says, aren’t necessarily good places for living. Instead, he says, “we come to New York for interaction and inspiration.” The principal lure is the possibility of serendipitous encounters. Ironically, a few years ago I missed David Byrne by a day at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. I wished like crazy that I’d bumped into him. But what if I had? Would this serendipitous encounter would have resulted in us creating something amazing together, or would he have just politely nodded when I came over to tell him how much I love his work?
Serendipity Isn’t Enough
Serendipity is a driving force behind my life and work. Much of my work is focused on engineering serendipity at Science House. Two people bumping into each other isn’t enough, unless they both belong to the same culture and they know exactly how an encounter is expected to unfold in their world. Meaningful serendipity requires a strong focus on cognitive diversity. There’s a particular potency in connecting two people who would never have meaningfully interacted even if they did bump into each other because there was no way into an initial interaction.
Back in the 1970’s artists probably didn’t interact much with the people they perceived as working stiffs. As result, few artists developed the business acumen necessary to make a living. Artists bumping into other artists or business people bumping into other business people or Mormons bumping into other Mormons, etc., isn’t real serendipity. Bringing two people together and creating a culture in which they can create unexpected common ground is where its at today. There’s business value in it, and there’s creative value, as well as the potential to create, and even sell, powerful art that illuminates some aspect of the human condition.
Byrne recalls the explosion of the art scene back in the 1970’s, when he moved to New York. The scene exploding today is different. It’s built around entrepreneurship. And while Byrne argues that business hubs are no way to live, what I think he means is “areas permeated by office buildings and people who slavishly follow cultural norms like zombies tend to be sterile.” If we want a city to live in, we have to work for someone else or become entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is a form of art. It requires improvisation, vulnerability, an exchange of ideas, a willingness to take risks, possible failure, and, yes, potential hardship.
Making a Creative Life
The difficulty of making an ongoing creative life, according to Byrne, is increasing. It is extremely difficult to get up every day with the kind of iron will and discipline required to maintain a creative life when society is clearly stacked against this endeavor. There’s no doubt that we lose a lot of talent to this struggle, just as we lose a lot of great athletes as an Olympic team gets whittled down to those most suited to compete. In the case of art, what does a win look like? In my opinion, it’s the ability to contribute something of value to the world, some combination of outstanding vision and technical ability, and the business skills to connect with buyers or supporters.
I’ve never wavered from my childhood determination to be an artist, even when I had to pay my own way in life, buy my own car, pay insurance and support myself through college. Some of my friends seemed to think that their parents’ credit cards were badges that they could flash in exchange for goods and services, everything from books and cars to clothes, rent and utilities, all of which I paid for myself, working multiple jobs. I agree with Byrne that hardship is hard, and not romantic. But I also remember wondering what would happen to my friends when their parents cut them off and they suddenly had to face the reality of making it in the world. I couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan in my early twenties, but I spent a huge amount of time here, getting a major dose of inspiration and unexpected encounters. I took this energy back into seclusion to do the hard, lonely work of growing my skills in an affordable living space while I worked to pay the bills and focused on my creative work in every spare moment. I believed that if I worked hard every single day to develop my skills I could eventually earn what I thought these skills might be worth.
Perhaps because I am the child of two parents who are extremely creative artists but totally lack business acumen, I didn’t expect the world to bow to my desire to spend my days creating art. My parents’ creativity made them very interesting, but the charm lost much of its luster when I had to completely support myself because they never figured out how to find a market for their work. I knew it might take years and years of scraping by, but that if I remained true to myself and constantly tried to improve, broaden my perspective and hone my technical skills, I would get there. It was an extremely difficult investment that I made in myself, because I didn’t expect anyone else to make an investment in me until I was ready. Byrne says that poverty wears a person down. Absolutely, it does. It motivated me to develop my business skills along with my art, rather than being mad that the world didn’t pay my rent.
At times I did resent the necessity to find ways to support myself, believing that it cut into my creative potential. Instead, every weird job I took along the way taught me something completely unexpected about what it means to be human, to belong to a culture, community and economy. Artists who are isolated, with only other artists for company, run the risk of becoming self indulgent and worse, irrelevant, without even realizing it. We all have our ideas about the value of art. I’m only interested in art that illuminates some aspect of the human condition in a thoughtful way, and that requires hard work and a businesslike attitude to one’s own work.
Science House has a growing science art collection that includes artists like Shane Hope. Scroll down his page and check out his work, and then think long and hard about kids jumping out of their meat bodies, getting their mass dumped by their moms into empty dimensions, printing printers and learning how to use deep empathy machines, and it becomes clear why and how the modern forms of art and the people who create it have transformed.
The New Scene
I’m with Byrne in his belief that the young are often the drivers of culture. However, we differ in our perspectives on what that means.
“This city doesn't make things anymore,” he says.
Wrong. We make businesses and employ creative people.
I spend a lot of time working with young people around the world and right here in New York. Just last night, a couple of kids traded me a piece of their collaborative science art for Walter Isaacson’s Einstein biography and Darwin’s Origin of Species. We watched a transparent, asexual hermaphrodite called a Daphnia give birth under a microscope on the BioBus after a Nobel Prize winning scientist, Dr. Martin Chalfie, gave a talk at Science House. In between, I mentored Manhattan girls who reached out to me through Natalie Portman’s THOR mentorship project. These kids are on the move, creating things. They are making something: the future. A life.
This is the scene that’s exploding. Curiosity. Human exploration and technology. As an artist myself, I know it’s easy for Byrne and others to roll their eyes and say that science and technology aren’t art. To which I say: What is art? It is the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination. This creative realm once belonged to painters, musicians and poets. That’s not the world we live in now, in which everybody needs to be creative in order to have a real life. The old model doesn’t apply. Big companies no longer provide a lifetime of structure and a gold watch to working stiffs while the fringe rebels act as canaries in the coalmine, illuminating the soul-deadening aspects of clock-punching and habit. The dangers of this lifestyle have been well covered by artists. Theavant-garde artists of our day have new subjects to cover, and new mediums in which to work. Maybe the young aren’t as interested in the old forms. That doesn’t mean they aren’t creating brilliant work. They are.
Byrne laments parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn being walled gardens for the rich. All self-defined communities, whether of rich people or artists, become walled gardens. Sure, some communities are much more interesting. In an art community, nobody makes small talk about kitchen renovations and kids’ soccer games. But the self-imposed exile in communities of artists can lead to an isolation that’s just as deep and dangerous. Illusions are illusions, no matter how much fun you have while developing them. More important than a neighborhood of like-minded people is an audience trained to spot truly groundbreaking work when they see it. If you want the next generation to succeed, learn to spot their unique genius, which may not resemble yours. But then again, they may not want it to.
The New Creative Genius
Missing the old days is a perennial emotion. Umair Haque took to Twitter this week, lamenting the fact that there are no John Lennons today--instead we have Miley Cyrus, twerking. That’s not how I look at it. We’ve got Malala Yousafzai, a 16 year old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban on her way to school.
The shooting of Malala is a horrific tragedy, but instead of curling up in a ball, she just published a memoir, “I am Malala,” a phrase that has become a battle cry for education around the world. She’s not a musician. She’s not a painter. But she is definitely an artist who flipped her near-death experience into a poetic cry for education. Like John Lennon, Dr. Martin Luther King and many other artists of life, she was, and is, willing to risk her life in order to help the rest of us understand something about ourselves and our world. Her talk at the UN was as poetic as any poetry ever written. In some ways, she picked up, literally and figuratively, where John Lennon left off.
"They thought that the bullets would silence us, but they failed," Malala said in July at the UN. "And then, out of that silence, came thousands of voices."
And forever, those voices will rise in response to circumstance. Nothing, not the Taliban, not the 1%, has the power to end that deep power of the human being to shape experience into art. The lack of affordable housing is a huge obstacle--but it won’t stop genius from manifesting, or young people from struggling against the odds to develop their skills and ability to express something important in a beautiful way. The battlefield has changed, and our most important artists will always evolve not only to keep pace with reality, but to shape it. Malala has a titanium plate in her head, but I prefer to think of it as a canvas, on which the people have the world have been given an opportunity to envision themselves.
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