Response to Joseppe

Good morning. This is a video response to Joseph, a new subscriber from Tel Aviv, who yesterday made a video in response to my YouTube and work video. It was a really interesting response, and I wanted to just talk out loud— I always talk out loud— think out loud about some of the things that Joe said, because I thought they were very, very interesting. Joe's an artist. If you haven't seen any of his videos, go take a look. I'll put the link— is that right? No, I I'll put the link over here. This is where the link's going to be, over here. Artists, as I said yesterday in the video, I've worked with designers for a long time, and in fact I'm just, I've just finished along with my co-author Jim Biolas, just finished writing a book about design, a book called Work Different: Design for the Rest of Us, which is about how design thinking and the, the approach that designers take to their work is relevant for non-designers, for people who work in all sorts of different places within corporations mostly, and how design thinking and the approach that designers take can help everybody be more effective in the way they do their work. Well, Joseph's video touched on 3 main— 3 important areas that I think are interesting, not just in regard to doing art, but in regard to what all of us are doing here on YouTube and maybe beyond YouTube. His first point was that in making videos as an artist, in making videos and in some ways revealing his creative process as he was creating, as we've seen in, you know, Paper Lilies painting, that blob painting that I have back there, and uh, uh, many others, uh, who are creating art in public here on YouTube. The idea of revealing the process of your work is something that, uh, has become a more, um, interesting part of what we do. You see, for example, Joseph talked about architecture and the opening up of space in architecture. You know, a lot of this happened years ago in Paris when the, when the Pompidou Art Museum was built, and the infrastructure of the building was essentially put on the outside instead of on the inside. All of the mechanical systems and so on were highlighted they were painted, and instead of trying to fade them into the background, they became part of the building that everybody saw when they were in the building. So Joseph takes that idea and connects it to making the process of creating a more accessible process. So this gets us away from this idea of slickness, which is, you know, perfect finished product being the only thing that's presented to us, and instead makes it not just okay but interesting to see the infrastructure of what's happening. I wrote a blog about something like this a few months ago where I talked about an idea that comes from an anthropologist, a guy named Claude Lévi-Strauss, who wrote a book called The Raw and the Cooked. And I didn't read the book, all I did was read lots of things about the book. So for all of you Straussians out there, apologies. But the idea was that cultures move from a period in which Essentially, he used food as a, as, you know, the, the example of demonstrating how cultures move from the raw to the cooked. They move from things being unfinished and rough to being finished and refined. And, and so we, of course, uh, um, much of what we produce we strive for that kind of finished, refined quality to it, because that was what professionalism was supposed to be like. Well, we've now moved into a period where all of us as amateur producers are not producing work that is fully cooked. I have been experimenting with green screens over the past week or so, which is a movement towards cooked. And some of my, some of the viewers, the people who commented on the videos, liked that. Others didn't. And I think, you know, part of it is this movement from the raw to the cooked, moving towards a more refined, professional way of doing things rather than to do them in the you know, rough kind of amateur way that we all find so appealing about so much of what we see here. So the idea that YouTube is a place where we all get to learn how to get comfortable with creating in public and revealing this imperfect sort of, you know, how much do you edit, how much do you leave in, you know, who do you want to be as you portray yourself? Is a great, I think, an interesting metaphor for other places in our work where we are able to be more transparent in how we do things. By the way, I think this is also related to a very important movement in a lot of design today, which is an appropriation of— and I mean that in terms of an internalization of the idea that comes from Japanese work, the idea of wabi-sabi. Wabi-sabi is, you know, this notion of the rustic simplicity of things being a tremendously appealing aspect of them. And the, you know, the beauty of a patina that has come up, been developed over time and has aged, being a very important aspect today of things of beauty. So we are becoming— if you walk into, you know, go into Anthropologie, for example, the store Anthropologie, and you see that's a store that is sort of saying, you know, look at what we present to you here. Everything here is raw, more raw than cooked, more wabi-sabi than modern minimalist high-tech kind of gloss. So here we are finding that as, I think, an interesting dimension. The second thing that Joseph talked about was how watching yourself create enhances self-awareness. So we all now get a chance to see ourselves in creative moments, and we also get a chance to cringe at ourselves. In creative moments and to say, "Oh, I can't believe I said that. I went on like that about—" I mean, all the things that we become aware of only by watching ourselves and become increasingly aware of how we create in the moment, how we create live, what our speech sounds like, what we look like when we are expressing ourselves. All of that is now available to us, and we get to watch others do that. And we can say, "Gee, that— I really— wow, that person's ease is really something I'd like to be able to attain," or, "I really am not all that crazy about, you know, that sort of cartoon." Whatever, whatever it is, we get to watch that and become self-aware in the process. And that self-awareness, as Joseph points out, is one of those two-edged swords that helps you to— helps us to both know what we're like, and also that self-awareness can be an inhibitor to our creativity. He talks about developing a Zen-like attitude towards ourselves as we create. You know, a great book, Zen and the Art of Archery, Talks about the development of technique that disappears and is unself-aware. And so the idea of creating in a way that has that quality to it of both awareness of others and yet an ability to put that awareness beyond the point of controlling what we do and say. I think a very interesting aspect. And the third aspect that he talked about is one that's very near and dear to me, which is fame and the impact of fame. Even little fame, little fame, big fame. You know, we've all been struggling in some way or other with this notion of fame here. People becoming famous, what does it mean when they become famous? They get to be too much, they are too— you know, if they're not If what we're talking about are people who are not professionals in the business of portraying themselves as performers, then we see people— geriatric, grignetto, bohemian— people who are everyday people, blunty everyday people who are becoming famous, not, you know, lonely girl Maybe not even Lucy in LA. She shows different— the idea that fame is an aspect of what goes on here, and that our desire and our ambivalence about fame— we want to become popular, we want to not need to be popular, we want to— so So being in this kind of a situation puts our beliefs about fame kind of out there for us to examine and to think about, and for others to examine and to think about, and to make judgments about what they think about our relationship with fame. So that's an overview of Joseph's video. Response to me. Thank you very much, Joseph. I appreciate that, and I look forward to going back and watching your videos and seeing a lot more of what you have to say. But thanks very much, and see you guys again soon.