Modeling Creativity—Part 3
Now for the kids
“Modeling Creativity” was written by John Vogel in conjunction with ParentSounds. Although it is broken into five parts due to length, we recommend reading it as one whole piece. Here are the previous parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, and Part 5.
While adults quitting music is to me something that’s kind of sad, we also need to look at how kids are often discouraged from participating in music right out of the gate.
In The Power of Vulnerability, Brené Brown talks about the kind of messaging that we receive as kids in terms of our artistic abilities.
She points out that in her interviews, 85% of adults “remember something so shaming that happened in school that it forever changed how they thought of themselves as learners. [For] 50% of those people, the shaming experience was around creativity.” And it doesn’t take a ton of imagination to conjure up these scenes. One that she gives is of a teacher looking at a child’s drawing and saying, “It’s a good thing you’re smart, John, because this is the worst horse I’ve seen in 20 years.”
But you can also easily picture an embarrassing performance; being made fun of by friends; being told “An artist, you are not”; or even the muted reaction of a person trying not to say something discouraging but not knowing what positive thing to say.
And this isn’t limited to an educational or social setting. It’s also the messaging that we’re getting from the media and society. In the previously mentioned “Amateurs” chapter in David Byrne’s How Music Works, he uses the example of an advertisement entitled “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music” in The New York Times Book Review. He points out:
This ad isn’t about learning to play for your own enjoyment or self-expression—it’s purely about learning to value the classics more than any music you and your pathetic friends might make . . . . The effect [is] to make you feel anxious and insecure about what you know and might already like, and to show you how to fix the situation.
Sowing the seeds of insecurity just to offer you the solution that they’re being paid to sell you is the perennial drive of advertisers. But this attitude also starts to creep into our society in the form of the cruelty culture we see in comments sections, the snarky criticism that festers in consumer guides such as Pitchfork and Spin while trying to cultivate a “cool” culture (Harold Bloom might be a good example in the literary world, although he cultivates more of an “intelligent” elite literary culture), or the dismissiveness of an audience who is not there to see the band. I can’t even count the number of times that I’ve intentionally watched a band I didn’t like just because everyone else left the room.
The shame resulting from having our art derided in public can be very damaging. There’s a storyline in the Netflix show Sex Education in which the character Lily gets a sexually explicit science fiction story published and immediately becomes a laughingstock at school. Perhaps the most hurtful part is that her partner, Ola, also doesn’t understand why she writes the stories she writes.
Every creative knows the feeling of alienation that comes along with making a piece of work that other people don’t like. There’s nothing in the world that is universally loved. Anthony Burgess hated the Beatles. I love them both.
In On Writing, Stephen King comments on his own experience with negative criticism following a scene in which he got in trouble at school for selling his own version of The Pit and the Pendulum:
I have spent a good many years since—too many, I think—being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all. I’m not editorializing, just trying to give you the facts as I see them.
Some people who engage in negative criticism will make the argument that it serves to improve the quality of what’s out there or to uphold “standards,” but it’s not. I believe it mostly comes from a place of trying to make other people not like the same things you don’t like, which can persuade people to stop liking things that they previously liked. That’s literally killing joy.
The time and place for constructive criticism is when it’s asked for in the creation of a piece and it can actually have an effect on the work. I came across this quote from
on ’s Proust Questionnaire recently:If someone comes to you with a manuscript they’re concerned about and asks for editorial input, it’s fine to tell them how you think it might be improved. When someone has published something, it’s done; they’ve put their heart out there; they’ve told the story the best they could, this isn’t the time to criticize. You find the things that are wonderful in the piece and you praise those. And if you have to lie, you lie. It’s easy to demoralize a writer and a demoralized writer is crushed. I’m amazed at how many people do not understand this.
I’m not trying to say that we have to like everything, and I’m not trying to say that we shouldn’t express our likes and dislikes. However, we do need to be mindful that an actual person made the thing we’re shitting on and that our tastes are individual. There’s no “good” and “bad” in art, only “like” and “dislike.” For anyone who disagrees with this line of thinking, John Carey makes the argument against objective aesthetics better than I ever could in What Good Are the Arts?
And I’ll leave off with two quotes from Brené Brown in Daring Greatly:
We’ve come to the point where, rather than respecting and appreciating the courage and daring behind vulnerability, we let our fear and discomfort become judgment and criticism.
To put our art, our writing, our photography, our ideas out into the world with no assurance of acceptance or appreciation—that’s also vulnerable.
Go to Part 4.
And don’t forget to check out our Parenting Roundtable with , , and .
 | A guest post by
|