The Feld-Blog

Note: As this entry will deal with distinctions between various kinds of creative individuals, I will use the term “creators” as a general term for all artists, designers and editors.

Creative identity is the realm of the artist, the editor, and the designer. The very philosophical choice to act as artist, editor, or designer necessarily colors the creator’s point of view and form of expression. Each approaches self-expression from a fundamentally different frame of mind and though our society chooses to categorize creators based on occupation, I submit that distinguishing between their basic mindsets will be a more useful tool – or at least a more accurate one – in terms of discussing the creative process. In fact, to my mind, colloquial understandings of the terms artist, editor, and designer actually obscure their respective functions.

Fundamentally, editors filter, designers solve, and artists question. Editors create by juxtaposing the creations of others. Their source material goes largely unquestioned and untouched, at least in terms of ideas; it comes pre-packaged for approval, disapproval and re-arrangement. Designers, by contrast, are problem solvers. They are given some source material, informed of their constraints and asked to create a solution. There is a beginning and an end, carving the path falls to the designer. Finally artists question our underlying assumptions. Their job is not to craft or carve any source material, but to discard it entirely in an effort to generate something unquestionably new, though often questionable in every other sense.

EDITORS:

Editors are the gatekeepers. They express point of view by sifting the good from the bad, dividing the profound from the trite, and creating sense and order from an otherwise cacophonous jumble of creative visions clawing for their attention. Whether on a large scale – choosing which films appear at Cannes – or a small scale – deleting commas and reordering paragraphs – the function is essentially the same: emphasizing and encouraging truly creative work while minimizing and revising that which… well… needs improvement? Besides the editor-in-chief of the New Yorker, the President of Cannes Film Festival, sound engineers everywhere and the President of Interscope Records who more obviously fit this mold, I think most actors, authors (prose), photographers, and the entire Dada movement fit this bill.

Gilles Jacob (The President of Cannes) and the David Remnick (editor-in-chief of the New Yorker) filter in a more easily identifiable and literal sense. They choose which works are good enough to represent the flagships of film and fiction respectively, editing out the rest. Dr. Dre, president and Founder of Interscope records, seeks out new talent and gives it a louder voice – a more proactive and constructive approach to filtering, and the compliment to the more passive and destructive (neither is meant pejoratively) approach of Jacob and Remnick. And in a stroke of literal textualism that could shock even Antonin Scalia, sound engineers and sound designers (though clearly I think the latter is a misnomer) filter musicians’ work to emphasize, exaggerate, minimize, or shape various elements of the music to afford the overall sound a depth it simply could not otherwise have achieved.

A bit more abstractly, actors observe people and filter those details of our behavior – facial ticks and verbal affectations – which betray our otherwise hidden thoughts and emotions. They sift through millions of subtle clues and they choose the most efficient combination to recreate the appearance of a desired emotion on stage.

Similarly, authors whittle away at the real world until their book captures a single narrative. They must pick and choose which details most effectively convey the story at hand. Even in works of fiction, good writing holds back the floodgates of possible information, and lets only the relevant details trickle through to create a narrative stream rather than an ocean of directionless, extraneous information.

Photographers observe everything they see with an editor’s eye. Photographers capture those moments of accidental or natural creative genius, which escape the careless glance – the filter – of most people. Thus, the beautiful images they capture, in some sense did not exist until they were immortalized on film, yet objectively their source material exists for all to see or imagine, if only we would consider everything we see with the same critical filter talented photographers uniquely posses.

Dada ‘artists’ reconstructed and re-edited the works of other people. Certainly, they created new ‘art’ out of old forms, but, in essence, they filtered what they considered to be the important aspects of creativity – the content – and destroyed or deleted the aspects they deemed unimportant – the orders and relationships between elements of content. This is perhaps the paradigmatic example of creative or ‘artistic’ editing. These editors express their creativity by juxtaposing, emphasizing, or deleting the creative works of others.

I used to be able to write. Words used to flow from my pen like… like… well, see? Now even the simplest of similes sounds trite (and are accompanied, apparently, by an abundance of aggravating alliteration*). Neglect (and schooling) has dulled the once sharp tools of my wit – to whatever extent I was witty – and voice – to whatever extent it was mine. Even when I had nothing to say, I said it well enough. When, a few days ago, I glanced at some of my previous work, I was overcome with a nostalgia for a time when words obeyed me with simple loyalty. Now my vocabulary clumsily tumbles to the page as if written left-handed.