The following question bothered me today, “Why are the so-called ‘art people’ valuable and what is the reason that they can’t make a lot of money?”
I decided to go back to my understanding of creativity. It seems to me that ‘creativity’ and ‘art’ are very correlated, since a great piece of art usually has an unusual and new perspective. So my theory is that there is no true creativity in this world. I think that our brains can never create something drastically new, they rather mix different things to come up with something whole, something ‘new’. In that sense, true imagination and creativity are non-existent.
So it follows that art people feel free enough to scoop elements of life from the most unrelated mediums and put them together. Art people are the ones that do the ‘forbidden’ things in our lives. We live according to rules, they go and say, “No i don’t think pencils should be used for drawing. They make up great chopsticks!”
And then it struck me how important it is to learn to put things together. We are so used to putting things that match, that we can’t see the true outcomes of unusual combinations (think of mentos + coke. Ever mixed those?) Everything we have today is a result of putting together smaller pieces. The better the putter you are, the better the problem solver you are. If you know how to put together unusual things, you will get unusual solutions, that no one has thought of before. Many are weird, don’t work, but the ones that work make it big because they are the only ones.