title: Art and values slug: art-and-values
Recently I have been linked to [a list of tips on storytelling by Pixar](http://io9.com/5916970/the-22-rules-of-storytelling-according-to-pixar). Among those rules one stuck out:14: Why must you tell THIS story? What's the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That's the heart of it.
I have been struggling to produce some form of artistic, or even creative output almost all my life, in different media and contexts. I have had to learn #14 on my own, and I can truly say that all my attempts up until I understood this simple fact were misguided and wrong, and I had to unlearn everything I had done until that point in time. The way I read it, it's "make sure your art tells a story". Trying hard, and I have thought about this on many occasions, I could not come up with a more essential and fundamental prerequisite to creating successful artistic output. There is so much "art" out there that simply does not have anything to say. There are so many struggling artists who do not have anything interesting to share with the world, and they keep wondering why they don't achieve success of any measure. I'm not going to say that realizing this made me insanely successful overnight, but it has given me a direction and hope of ever actually reaching the point at which I can be satisfied with something I have created.
However, I think that it is more important than just as a way to make good art. The quote originally reads:
"Why must you tell THIS story? What's the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That's the heart of it."
I would say that this generalizes to:
"What is the value of what you're doing?"
This is crucial. A lot of people do things without value, or do not focus on the actual value of what they're doing and let themselves become sidetracked by the whole ritual of their form. What I mean by "the ritual of their form" is the often sizeable set of gimmicks you feel forced to tack onto whatever you are making. For example, every website now "needs" Oauth and social network support and other junk. It is not crucial, but it's something everyone feels they need to have. This sort of ritualistic dance happens in every form of output, be it when they create a computer program, a business (we need to be agile! be green! support the community!), a new philosophy, a new movie, a new bicycle, a new mathematics theorem, a new noodle recipe.
The generalized form does lose its potency, though. Applied literally to music, you'd ask:
What is the value of the music you are creating?
I think asking What is the story your music tells? is much more accurate. I guess I am trying to say that the word value can be interpreted in different ways, and many of them are not going to get you very far from what you are doing already. For example, when thinking of technology, value is application. So I'd ask: What sort of application can this technology bear?
If I were going to add anything to Pixar's list, it would be this:
!!!! KEEP A SCRAPBOOK, ASSOCIATE ENTRIES TO THE VALUES (EMOTIONS, THEMES, APPLICATIONS) THEY EVOKE !!!!
Yup, all caps, so that you don't scroll past. This was the single thing that boosted my productivity most in the last several years, and it outclasses everything else by very, very far.
I currently have two directories under $HOME/Documents, called creative and topics. I first started topics where I'd save pages visited, notes, documents, and so on in a directory tree, so for example I have topics/computers/haskell/refactoring/. and topics/electronics/tubes/. and topics/health/bodybuilding/training-plan/. and so on. Later I started noticing that I also visit a lot of creative stuff that I want to keep a track of, which I cannot sort into the rigid system I built under topics because it evoked emotions, rather than ideas for practical applications. I then started the creative directory. I guess that those are my Starship & Canoe (and if you haven't read the book, at least read a summary). The creative system came into place a bit after I started trawling Youtube for music I like, and decided to sort it according to emotion. I now have 59 private playlists, with entries like "feeling of optimism and inner peace", "peril / 70s car chase", "hanging at the peak", "hyped", and "pleasant summer sun"; many of those have more than 20 entries. Some of the names won't make much of a sense to anyone but me. My creative directory contains entries like beauty, inspirational, introversion, poverty, trippy, and so on.
If there was only one thing they would have taught me during primary and high school, I wish it was how to scrapbook. Sadly, they haven't. As many people, I can't really pinpoint one skill I use every day that school has taught me.
Going back to the topic of conveying values through your work, I think it's a fairly important theme: what sort of philosophical value does your art carry with itself? If you sit down and try to make songs by the numbers, it's almost certain you won't be conveying anything through your output. I might be going out on a limb, but I will pose the statement that art is, and historically viewed mostly was, a way to bring philosophy to the masses in a consumable way. The oldest classics convey philosophy, the biggest blockbusters end up telling endearing stories. Even Star Wars came with a good chunk of Zen wisdom. Everything inbetween follows suit.
This is fairly important in business, as well. Explained in similar terms as above, business is, and historically viewed mostly was, a way to bring value to others in an easy to use way. Dyson made it big because his customers didn't have to buy new bags. Apple made it big because the Macintosh just works. IBM made it big because they helped big companies with payroll problems. Julius Caesar is remembered for building infrastructure. One of the oldest companies on earth, Avedis Zildjian, has knowledge of manufacture they kept secret for centuries; armies using their products had a distinct advantage over the enemy they faced. The Hanseatic League was created to protect trade. This might be trite, but ask yourself: how many businesses nowadays bring too little value to warrant their existance? With patent trolls under every rock, the RIAA and MPAA running wild, and many governments losing their value to their people, I'd say more than ever.
Every time people get too infatuated with form and forget to convey meaning, their ecosystem is bound to crash. Be it the bond market crashing in the late 80s, 909/303 acid techno dying out in the early 90s, the dot com bubble in later 90s, the mortgage market crashing in the naughties, print magazine publishers simply shutting down one after another. When you're churning out vinyls simply trying different permutations of repetitive musical sequences and knob twisting, when you make it your mission to sell people bonds based on something of little to no value, when you desperately try to push out issue after issue of uninteresting articles just to fill your 80 pages, you have no reason to exist. Form over meaning ends up being futile.
I guess it is, in the end, all about having your values right.