I want to talk to you a little bit today about what artists do and why.
And then, more specifically, what Tadeusz is doing and perhaps why.
I think...
I'll tell you something we've discovered in my lab
I'm a professor in the psychology department at St. George at the University of Toronto.
because it's culturally relevant.
You know there's a real tension in our culture between the tech capitalist forces, so to so speak,
and people who are critics of capitalism.
and most of the supporters of capitalism are sort of on the right wing end of things.
There are complicated reasons for that, a lot of them are personality based.
but capitalism depends on entrepreneurs,
and entrepreneurs are not like managers and administrators
and so managers and administrators, of course, are necessary to keep the entire capitalist edifice going.
The whole social edifice going.
but entrepreneurs are necessary to continually generate the new ideas that allow us to keep pace
with the changing environment and the culture itself.
And entrepreneurs are like artists. They have exactly the same personality structures.
So the entrepreneurs are with the artists.
And that's a real problem in some ways for our political culture because the right wing, of course,
promotes capitalistic social structures, but is not temperamentally inclined to appreciate art.
And that means they're not temperamentally inclined to set things up to foster entrepreneurial activity.
And that's really not a good thing.
It also means that people on the more conservative end of the political spectrum
radically underestimate the utility of artistic endeavors -- both practically and and culturally.
Because artistic endeavor, in some sense, is at the base of everything people do.
Having said that, I'm going to tell you a little bit about what you've all seen artists do in cities.
When the cities became various places
usually it has to begin in a somewhat interesting way.
The artists are the first people to pick up on the possibilities that that decayed landscape now presents.
And the possibilities are usually two fold. One is, well, it's cheap
And that's their priority because, of course, they never have the money.
But the other is that this is a place it could be beautiful again if someone just paid enough attention to it.
And the artists are very good at picking out places that are cool, but a little on the...
unsafe side, let's say, or maybe...
No, that's a good enough explanation
And that's sort of where artists live.
Because they have a niche. They have a biological niche. They're biological niches.
Interesting and non-safe.
And then artists move in there and they civilize it. And then other people can move in.
And that's what artists do, and they do that conceptually too.
Here's a way of thinking about that
We occupy a conceptual space and it's virtually indistinguishable from the physical landscape
Because when you see the physical landscape, you interpret through your conceptual structures
so the two are very difficult to separate.
The part of the world of experience that you inhabit and that you understand
that's sort of an orderly part
An orderly part is that part where when you do something
and you want something to happen as a consequence, it happens.
And so that's the domain where you're competent and your skills produce the intended results
and you can be calm and secure and productive there.
But there's a much larger domain that's around that and that's the domain that you know nothing about.
That's true everywhere when you come into a situation like this
It's interesting, but it's also somewhat intimidating
especially if you're not all that extroverted, because there's all these people around
and you know what you're thinking and you don't know what they're doing and you have to interact with them.
And that's all unknown territory. So wherever you go there's known territory and unknown territory
So it's just sort of like the fundamental building blocks of reality: chaos and order.
And those are the fundamental building blocks.
Some people like order and some people like chaos.
And if you like order too much, you're really in trouble and so is everyone else.
And if you like chaos too much, then you're really in trouble and so is everyone else.
They have to balance properly and order has to expand
And artists live on the border between order and chaos. That's their niche.
And that's an exciting place to be because that's where information flow is maximized
because they have one foot in what they expect and what they've mastered - that would be their skill.
And Tadeusz is a skilled artist.
And I think you can't be an artist without being skilled, although lots of people think that's not true
those are mostly wanna-be artists, if that.
And then you have one foot in chaos.
As an artist, you exist there.
But as people experience art through you, and also as a consequence of your artistic productions
You've also put them there.
And people like to be there because that's where all the dynamism is.
It's exciting there. Although it's also frightening.
It's frightening because you don't exactly know what to expect there and there might be strange demands put on you.
So what artists do is expand the domain of order into the domain of chaos.
And they do that for everyone.
And they don't necessarily reap the rewards for that.
When artists go into a neighborhood and revitalize it and turn it into valuable property once again
By the time the values extracted, the artists will be chased away.
So what they produce in terms of economic utility is garnered by other people
But what they do is incredibly important. They civilize us. And they teach us how to see.
And what Tad is doing with his paintings is
Well one thing he's doing is forcing you to see.
Because he doesn't do...
He's done the work to make something but then he takes away everything that makes it easy to see
And that means you can't come in here and be perceptually lazy.
You have to pay attention.
And good art should make you pay attention.
And good art will make you see things in a new way And I mean that literally. I don't mean that metaphorically
because artists are geniuses at perception.
They teach you how to be smarter at seeing things and seeing things is by no means just looking at what's there and noticing.
It's like, what's there?
That's a complicated problem.
And there's lots of ways to see what's there.
When you look at a painting. When I'm feeling here today
the first thing I thought was this looks like the right setting for ?? because they've got a roughness
So this sort of industrial setting works.
The second thing I thought was
I'm not sure the paintings are working here because they... kind of just looks like blurs
And then I walked in and I started looking and then all the sudden the paintings started to build themselves
And that's because Tad gives you enough information so that your brain can draw on your memory
to build the things he's representing so he's forcing you to participate the creative process along with him.
And that's a gift because
Creativity. People like to think that everyone's creative
and that's actually rubbish.
Most people are not creative at all.
And I can tell you how we know that. We've given thousands of people tests of creative achievement.
And that might be as simple as taking a music lesson which would be sort of step number one.
And the median score on our questionnaires is zero.
It's 13 dimensions of creativity.
So creativity is very rare. Extreme creativity is extremely rare.
Although often mimicked.
If you're participating in the construction of an image with ??
You need to stand in an artist's footprint, at least for the time you're doing that.
And that's a gift.
And I'll close that by noting that
Even people who are very conservative by temperament have benefited because of that.
know at some level that's it's a gift because the most expensive artifacts in our society our artistic productions.
How in the world do you account for that?
Well.
Art stands at the bottom of everything.
And it's the process that's helped people transform themselves
into the relatively civilized and intelligent beings that they are today.
And our species as a whole is smart enough to appreciate that.
And to move forward with it.
And it's interesting to see what Tad's done with these paintings
and it's a privilege, I think, to see them because
you get a chance to play your role in that process and to benefit from it.
Thank you very much.
