Creativity: Brash Genius or Late Bloomer?…….
David Galenson has written an interesting book which describes two distinct trends in creativity. In Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, Mr. Galenson studied art text books noting the works most often depicted for each major artist with the assumption that those mentioned would be considered by scholars to be the most important. After selecting the artist’s signature works, Galenson recorded the age of the artist at the time of creation. The artists studied seemed to break into two camps. The first produced their most important works in their twenties and early thirties and then gradually dropped off the radar. The second group did not receive major recognition until after forty.
Beefing up this discovery with auction prices, biographical information along with applying his analytical method to other fields -including poetry, Galenson concluded that these age groups tend to view the world in one of two distinct modes: as a conceptualist or experimentalist. Galenson labeled the younger group conceptualists. These artists see the big picture and want to replace it with something radical and new. Conceptualist know what they want and when they have created it. Artist who fall into this group include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Mozart.
The older group tend to be experimentalists. Experimentalists work within established conceptual models and focus instead on the manipulation of details. These artists spend their lives tinkering with methods and techniques unsure if they have reached their goal –or even what that goal might be. Some examples of celebrated experimentalist would be Mark Twain, Paul Cezanne, and Beethoven.
Add comment August 30th, 2006