perspectives on talent: page 3

In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Art - by Linda Weintraub

In her trademark writing style -- straightforward and jargon-free -- Weintraub sets out to itemize the conceptual and practical concerns that go into making contemporary art in all its endless permutations.

In six clearly defined thematic sections -- "Scoping an Audience," "Sourcing Inspiration," "Crafting an Artistic 'Self,'" "Expressing an Artistic Attitude," "Choosing a Mission," and "Measuring Success" -- Weintraub moves artist by artist, in 40 individual chapters, using each to explain a different aspect of art making.

Linda Weintraub, author of Art on the Edge... was named the Henry R. Luce Professor of Emerging Arts at Oberlin College in 2000, a multi-year post designed to facilitate the introduction of innovative, interdisciplinary, pedagogical schemes in a curriculum dedicated to fostering the creative process. [Amazon.com summary]

photos of artists included in the book: Yukinori Yanagi [bottom], Nan Goldin

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Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists by Patrick Colm Hogan

".. provides a much needed critical introduction to the cognitive study of the verbal, visual, and musical arts, basing its claims on the methods and findings of mainstream cognitive science.

Written with authority, verve, and above all clarity, Hoganís exciting new book will prove an indispensable guide for those new to the field and a provocative and challenging overview for those already engaged in cognitive criticism and theory.î

Alan Richardson, Prof of English, Boston College, & author of book British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind
Patrick Colm Hogan is a Professor in English, Comparative Literature, and Cognitive Science at the University of Connecticut.

Whether it's cultural trauma, or simply the nature of being alive, living here on the planet, the arts provide multiple perspectives, a sense of knowing and understanding, a sense that there's not one way to deal with complexity and ambiguity. The arts provide a foundation for self-reflection and critical analysis.

Robert Sain - curator, Los Angeles County Museum of Art .. [Christian Science Monitor, Dec 28, 2001]

images: catalogs from past museum exhibitions: Munakata Shiko: Japanese Master of theModern Print,
and Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett: Recasting Pygmalion

Fire in the Crucible: Understanding the Process of Creative Genius by John Briggs

John Briggs reveals that there is no special trait of genius. Geniuses are not necessarily smarter or more talented than other people, but they give their attention to subtle nuances, contradictory feelings and perceptions that others experience and ignore. ...

Fire in the Crucible offers a compelling exploration of the roots of creativity and genius. Drawing on the lives and work of extraordinary scientists, artists, writers, composers, and inventors, Briggs shows how creative individuals exploit doubt and uncertainty, and the mental strategies and tactics they employ when they work. [amazon.com summary]

Onegin was often despised and my feeling is that society can suffocate passion and inspiration. I believe that this is typical of the artist and that these are the people that we have to champion, because the painter, the musician, the poet, even directors and actors are those who can speak to the passion, the true and positive sensibilities of the heart.

And I think hierarchy, structures, politics, intrigue and the corporate world of today - which is the modern version of the St. Petersburg court of Onegin's time - can suffocate the light of the mind and the light of the spirit.

Ralph Fiennes***[urbancinefile.com.au interview June 22, 2000] - Fiennes plays Evgeny Onegin in the film directed by his sister Martha, based on the Pushkin novel

Traditionally, "abilities," "competencies," and "expertise" have been viewed as separate and largely distinct constructs and research areas within the broader field of psychology.

On this traditional view, the psychology of abilities studies peopleís largely innate capabilities; the psychology of competencies studies skills people have acquired; and the psychology of expertise studies the development and structure of peopleís extraordinary mastery of skills.

The PACE Center at Yale is dedicated to the idea that these three areas of psychology are inextricably intertwined. Abilities are and must be measured as developing competencies, which in turn can be transformed into various forms of developing expertise. Abilities, then, are incipient forms of developing expertise. As a result, abilities as well as the competencies and expertise that develop from them are flexible and modifiable in nature.

from site of The PACE Center of Yale University for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise , Robert J. Sternberg, Director - editor of books:

Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid*****Handbook of Creativity

image: Russell Crowe as Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind [dvd]

Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

This book is about creativity, based on histories of contemporary people who know about it firsthand. It starts with a description of what creativity is, it reviews the way creative people work and live, and it ends with ideas about how to make your life more like that of the creative exemplars I studied.

There are no simple solutions in these pages and a few unfamiliar ideas. The real story of creativity in more difficult and strange than many overly optimistic accounts have claimed. [excerpt from the book]

Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid edited by Robert J. Sternberg

"One need not look far to find breathtaking acts of stupidity committed by people who are smart, or even brilliant. The behavior of smart individuals -- from presidents to prosecutors to professors -- is at times so amazingly stupid as to seem inexplicable. Why do otherwise intelligent people think and behave in ways so stupid that they sometimes destroy their livelihoods or even their lives?"

Robert J. Sternberg is IBM Professor of Psychology and Education, and director of PACE, the Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies and Expertise at Yale University [image of Monica Lewinsky not from book]

The Creative Process: Reflections on the Invention of Art by Brewster Ghiselin

This unique anthology brings together material from 38 well-known writers, artists, and scientists who attempt to describe the process by which original ideas come to them. Contributors include Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Amy Lowell, Rudyard Kipling, Max Ernst, Katherine Anne Porter, Henry Miller, Carl Gustav Jung [right], Mary Wigman, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Henri Poincar and many others.

[How you would define "self-mastery."]

Jean Houston: I would never use the word "mastery"! I thought I'd tell you that right away. Maybe that's a feminine point of view -- I can talk about an orchestration and a balance of capacities, but I don't think I'd ever use the word "mastery." To me, it smacks of galloping chutzpah! I just don't think self-mastery exists. ... I think the nearest that we can come to talking about self-mastery is to talk about the nature of essence; and when we touch into essence, latent abilities and skills suddenly jump into life.

from article Orchestrating Our Many Selves, from What is Enlightenment site wie.org

*book:**A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story by Jean Houston

The Arts and Human Development : A Psychological Study of the Artistic Process
by Howard E. Gardner

"The classic introduction to Howard Gardner's path-breaking ideas on the development of creativity,
with a new introduction by the author." [Amazon.com summary]

I don't know [what the future holds], I still have so much to discover. Maybe I'll be an actress for the next 10 years, maybe after that it'll be directing. Maybe I'll be a painter - I started painting [when making "Frida"] and love it. Maybe being a mother will be the best role in my life - who is to say? I know I'll always want to be creating something.

Salma Hayek*****[Tatler, June 2002 - posted on hayekheaven.net]

Bebe Neuwirth studied dance at Juilliard and performed with the Princeton Ballet Company before making her Broadway debut. But it was as an actress -- playing Lilith, the stern psychiatrist who was Frasier Crane's wife on "Cheers" -- that she entered the popular consciousness.

"My feeling is that it's all acting -- when you perform, you are either talking, singing or dancing," Ms. Neuwirth said. "In a very well-made musical, you talk until your emotions get so high that you have to start singing. And when that gets so high, you have to start dancing. So you could say that dancing is the ultimate expression.

"So when people ask me when I got into acting, I say that's what I was doing when I was 13 and playing the cat in 'Peter and the Wolf' -- that was acting. The only thing is, in a movie or television or sometimes onstage, you're just talking."

But even when she's "just talking," her dance training remains an important part of Ms. Neuwirth's method. "I try to investigate the physicality of the person I'm playing, and I do like to work from the outside in," she said. "I know a lot of actors and actresses work from the inside out, and maybe they're more intellectual than I am.

But for me, because I have described emotions and characters and situations physically, since I was in ballet class at 5, that's what my mind goes to first. If I know the way a person walks, I know who they are."
NY Times, July 19, 2002

As early as I can remember, I was a mover, in ways you don't consider dance. They're movement experiences. I would try to fly, and if I ever met anyone who'd never tried to fly, I'd say, "Go back. Your life is missing something."

I learned about motion when I was quite young, maybe seven, and many a bruised bone did I have lumping off our chicken ranch roof. I was sure what was wrong was merely timing. I had not put my arms and legs in the right places at the right time to sustain myself in the air. Otherwise, of course, I could fly. ... Many a bruised bottom came from this assumption. But those were important movement experiences. I knew I could fly if I got it right. ...

The thing I learned, probably from my father, was: Dream it, then bring it into practice. I still use that, I realize, except now I know better how. I don't fall down, and I don't break my neck trying to jump off the roof.

choreographer Bella Lewitzky -- from book: State of the Arts by Barbara Isenberg

The sensibility in this culture is so hard-edged, so brutal, so ridiculing, and so dismissive. I think the most radical thing you can do now is to be tender. That's really pushing the envelope. Wanting something higher, for the species, is considered -- well, you're just stupid. You're an imbecile for that. ... Sometimes I think I invent characters to create a society that's more acceptable to me.

Lily Tomlin**[AARP Modern Maturity, March/April 2002] image from lilytomlin.com

*-book:*-Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe by Jane Wagner

Art and physics are a strange coupling. Of the many human disciplines, could there be two that seem more divergent? ... Yet despite what appear to be irreconcilable differences, there is one fundamental feature that solidly connects these disciplines. Revolutionary art and visionary physics are both investigations into the nature of reality.

Roy Lichtenstein, the pop artist of the 1960s, declared, "Organized perception is what art is all about." ... The novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote, "There is no science without fancy and no art without facts."

**book:**Art & Physics : Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light by Leonard Shlain

Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence. Norman Podhoretz

**book:**Ex-Friends : Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer by Norman Podhoretz

"Works of art are indeed always products of having been in danger, of having
gone to the very end in an experience, to where one can go no further."
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

*-book:*-Rainer Maria Rilke. Letters to a Young Poet

Gary Zukav: "We have only the gift of sharing perceptions that hopefully can help those on their journey. There is no such thing as an expert on the human experience. [It] is an experience in movement and thought and form, and, in some cases, an experiment...

"The most that we can do is comment on the movement, the thought and the form, but those comments are of great value if they can help people to learn to move gracefully, to think clearly, to form -- like artists -- the matter of their lives."

**book:**The Seat of the Soul