This whole thing strikes me as coming from the wrong direction. Tying artistic and financial success, trying to apply some cargo cult "problem" engineering mentality to art. I feel like these articles illustrate quite well why the academic plastic arts have become so irrelevant today that we could say they are not part of human culture at large, in the sense that they have vanishing influence on public discourse.
I was always told that the difference between art and design is that the artist creates the problem, and the designers solve them.
I thought it followed the Socrates tradition in that the true philosopher is the one asking the questions, and it is the role of the student to answer them.
Am I right in saying the conclusion of the experiment was: people who spend more time thinking about a problem before acting tend to find it more engaging and were therefore more successful?
I wonder if the quality of the art suffered within the context of the experiment because of the time constraint, even if in the long run those people tended to create better art.
My first answer was disingenuous, so here's another interpretation.
I didn't see a definition in the article, however I was reading Edgar Payne's Compostion of Outdoor Painting after reading your comment, and I was surprised to find the book talked about problem finding.
"Art is the art of disguising art". This means artists have to make a representation of a material object while obscuring all the rules and principles required to make the representation.
The problem is: how to make art without making it blatantly obvious it was an effort to make?
That experiment might simply divide artists into those who understand bullshit assignments and can adapt to that context, and those who don't and can't.
There are plenty of artists who can do well on SATs, and can fill out bureaucratic forms, and complete one-hour timed tests. They might well take a lot of time to think and explore when they are making their own art on their own schedule.
But I know artists who just can't function well under artificial constraints and can't adapt well to someone else telling them how to create art.
I program and project manage games, I am certainly a problem solver on the team, and I definitely view the artists as problem creators. They will make everything harder for everyone else, but it's cus they are just 100% focused on the art, they want the art to be as good as possible and to realize their vision, so having them on the team means a lot more work in general but a far better looking game.
In my days in art academy, the running joke was that
If you were accepted into the painting faculty, you were an artist,
If you were accepted into graphics faculty, you were color-blind,
If you were accepted into sculpture, you were blind,
If you were accepted into art history, you couldn't be taught to draw.
While a little cruel... (I was in the graphics), the general idea was to say that art theory, art history, and especially psychology studies around art are absolute rubbish. These people seem to get into their line of work because they failed as artists (and don't understand / can't produce art).
Likewise, in this article, the approach to defining creative thinking is... so simplistic, and the test is so irrelevant...
Just to try to give you some background as to why a student could choose one approach or the other: if a student wasn't told why they need to draw a still life, they probably didn't care much for the outcome either. Artists rarely know why they prefer one composition over the other, especially in academic studies like... still life. To an artist, the selection of objects for a still life is really arbitrary, their arrangement is arbitrary -- it makes no difference. To make an interesting still life, one would have to find something that would interest other artists in it. Like, for example, how one can show different textures of the objects of the same nominal color using color? Or... would a technique that models volume through the thickness / intensity of contours work on mostly round objects? And so on.
Later, the article is trying to assess the artist's accomplishments in ways artists would frown upon. The number of exhibitions? The sales in prestigious galleries? Yeah... as a student I spent some time working in the lab of Kadishman (the guy who draws the same sheep over and over, and then sells it for insane $$). The "master" doesn't even draw the sheep anymore. It's all Shinkar / Bezalel students who do it :D And, honestly, the sheep is one of the biggest frauds I've personally witnessed in this profession (there are, of course, things like the diamond skull from Damien Hirst, which are more expensive because of the materials used, but I didn't have a chance to behold the miracle with my own eyes).
I find many software developers are solution-oriented instead of problem-oriented. Because that's a common theme in my head it's what I see here, whether that's what was intended or not.
I believe that developers who orient their thinking/work around the problem they're solving instead of the solution they're implementing generally have a better outcome.
I wonder if that's what was happening with the artists in the study? The "successful" artists were really focusing on what they were trying to achieve, putting their time and attention into that?
(But then this ties into other comments here about the criteria for success. Maybe success in software problem solving doesn't correlate that well with success as an artist. I think success as an artist comes down to being considered an artist by the artist gatekeepers, who are some combination of other artists and people who fund artists.)
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 27.5 ms ] threadI thought it followed the Socrates tradition in that the true philosopher is the one asking the questions, and it is the role of the student to answer them.
I wish I remembered who I am quoting here
I wonder if the quality of the art suffered within the context of the experiment because of the time constraint, even if in the long run those people tended to create better art.
I didn't see a definition in the article, however I was reading Edgar Payne's Compostion of Outdoor Painting after reading your comment, and I was surprised to find the book talked about problem finding.
"Art is the art of disguising art". This means artists have to make a representation of a material object while obscuring all the rules and principles required to make the representation.
The problem is: how to make art without making it blatantly obvious it was an effort to make?
There are plenty of artists who can do well on SATs, and can fill out bureaucratic forms, and complete one-hour timed tests. They might well take a lot of time to think and explore when they are making their own art on their own schedule.
But I know artists who just can't function well under artificial constraints and can't adapt well to someone else telling them how to create art.
Likewise, in this article, the approach to defining creative thinking is... so simplistic, and the test is so irrelevant...
Just to try to give you some background as to why a student could choose one approach or the other: if a student wasn't told why they need to draw a still life, they probably didn't care much for the outcome either. Artists rarely know why they prefer one composition over the other, especially in academic studies like... still life. To an artist, the selection of objects for a still life is really arbitrary, their arrangement is arbitrary -- it makes no difference. To make an interesting still life, one would have to find something that would interest other artists in it. Like, for example, how one can show different textures of the objects of the same nominal color using color? Or... would a technique that models volume through the thickness / intensity of contours work on mostly round objects? And so on.
Later, the article is trying to assess the artist's accomplishments in ways artists would frown upon. The number of exhibitions? The sales in prestigious galleries? Yeah... as a student I spent some time working in the lab of Kadishman (the guy who draws the same sheep over and over, and then sells it for insane $$). The "master" doesn't even draw the sheep anymore. It's all Shinkar / Bezalel students who do it :D And, honestly, the sheep is one of the biggest frauds I've personally witnessed in this profession (there are, of course, things like the diamond skull from Damien Hirst, which are more expensive because of the materials used, but I didn't have a chance to behold the miracle with my own eyes).
I believe that developers who orient their thinking/work around the problem they're solving instead of the solution they're implementing generally have a better outcome.
I wonder if that's what was happening with the artists in the study? The "successful" artists were really focusing on what they were trying to achieve, putting their time and attention into that?
(But then this ties into other comments here about the criteria for success. Maybe success in software problem solving doesn't correlate that well with success as an artist. I think success as an artist comes down to being considered an artist by the artist gatekeepers, who are some combination of other artists and people who fund artists.)