Sunday, December 2, 2007

Cheap Turpentine

"When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine." - Pablo Picasso, quoted in "Code Complete" by Steve McConnell
This quote nailed it for me. I still love philosophizing about software and technology, but I know it isn't real so I don't take it too seriously.

1 comment:

  1. I like this post very much,
    and I appreciate the link to Code Complete as a reference for further reading.

    I experience that it's not easy to be doing something and put an emphasize on finding plain cheap turpentine, rather than on becoming beautifully philosophical about the thing.
    Various concepts, ambitions and ideas are getting in the way of the Doing, in a time when they don't belong - yet.

    Critics do have their time. it's just not the time of creation.
    Their time comes after an object was created. Then the critics are trying to use the fact that the object that was created is present as a trigger for a stream of thought that comes from their own minds. The experience of these streams of thoughts is a good experience, and a creative one, inspired by the presence of the object that the artist created , but irrelevant to the process of creation that the artist is having.

    I guess - NO, I KNOW :( - confusing the role of critics with the role of the artist when trying to create an object can really get in the way of creating that object, and that's because critics don't know where to buy cheap turpentine or the various ways of using it.

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