Thursday, June 21, 2007

Finders Seekers : Dichotomy in Innovation

Art and Literature
have something to do with innovation.

Are innovators "seekers"? or "finders" ?
and does it make a difference ?

We refer here to the website Arts of Innovation
and its sister Arts of Innovation blog
which are described as follows:

"The author
Colin Stewart, innovation columnist for the Orange County Register, runs this Web site and the associated Arts of Innovation blog. He can be reached by e-mail at cestewart (at) cox.net.

The researcher

ArtsOfInnovation.com and the Arts of Innovation blog elaborate on research into the careers of experimental and conceptual innovators by University of Chicago economist David Galenson."
[links added]

Galenson is the author of
Old Masters and Young Geniuses:
Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity


which has been reviewed by Malcolm Gladwell as follows in Age Before Beauty:

"There’s a really wonderful book that’s come out by a guy named David Galenson, who’s an economist at the University of Chicago... There’s something very interesting and important to be learned about the way our minds work by entertaining the notion that there are two very different styles of creativity, the Picasso and the Cézanne."

Definitely worth a read and we have blogrolled them at Literary Pundit and LawPundit.

See also Inside Innovation

Monday, June 18, 2007

Vanity Fair and the Images in Mirrors

In Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray writes:*

"The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face." (p.8)

By the same token, society for its part rewards most highly those who mirror its own image:

"Vanity Fair -- Vanity Fair! Here was a man, who could not spell, and did not care to read -- who had the habits and the cunning of a boor : whose aim in life was pettifogging : who never had a taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul : and yet he had rank, and honours, and power, somehow : and was a dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state. He was high sheriff, and rode in a golden coach. Great ministers and statesmen courted him ; and in Vanity Fair he had a higher place than the most brilliant genius or spotless virtue." (p. 77, links added by LawPundit)

Not those who are "better" or "worse" are loved, but those who are mirrored faces of the beholder.

This mirror also determines how we view the rest of humanity and the groups within it.

Just a thought.

*From William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Penguin Popular Classics, 1994, first published in 1877