I … don’t understand.

I can honestly say that I don’t completely agree with this article, and also that I don’t completely disagree either.

It seems that, at some point, someone is going to come up with something new.

Or perhaps it’s how you define “new,” and I don’t even want to get into THAT discussion.

Stred fabba warr. Rac nabba dee, fromm, sock. Narb floth rhennie soomme tou. Plato.

Above is a completely original critique of Plato using an original language. Unfortunately, since Alister Crowley and Anthony Burgess have already given original critiques of Plato in original languages I’m just spinning my wheels here.

I’m with Toadman. There’s a pretty strong case for arguing that Bach wasn’t original: if anyone composed music that just sounds ‘found’ as in there and nature, and he just wrote down the notes, it was Bach. And whether Einstein was original is really an unpleasant can of worms. Mathematicians and scientists describe the universe; they don’t make it up. And of course he had to use pre-existing mathematical techniques and the observations made by others. (There really is a claim that Newton was original; however as his greatest invention, the calculus, was also invented by Leibnitz around the same time, this may be questionable.)

What’s wrong with the article is the trite assumption that schools have some simple and global ethos. Students (or as I still say, children) should be able to express themselves; and they should be encouraged to do so. But schools also teach grammar. And these aren’t mutually exclusive. There is, to be boring, a time and place for each. The reason that schools are portrayed in this way is that creative type classes are what television crews and journalists want to see. A lesson where a teacher pushes some information at the kids may tell us a little about the teacher, but teachers are generally less telegenic than children, so a film of babbling bairns is always more likely to survive the cutting room.

As for “You can’t blame the students. They get assessed on nothing else,” Isn’t it a cliche than an article supposedly about facts gets them so far wrong?

God, that was stupid.

What Christmas at #8 said.

I think the correct Plato quote is “Somewhere there is a perfect recording of ‘She’s So Cold’ in the sky.”

This is a really tired argument. Teachers don’t tell kids not to worry about facts, or grammar, or technique. Teaching is not psychotherapy.

Some people are original, and usually the greatest originality is that which comes in the context of the work of its time.

Einstein was incredibly original, but it was only because he first went to the trouble of learning the foundations of existing physics theory that his orginiality was world-changing. He proposed that the solution to a number of problems with electrodynamics was that the speed of light was a constant of the universe. So no matter how fast you’re going in any direction, light is always going the same speed to or from you! That’s a really weird conclusion to come to, and one which almost nobody would posit without experimental evidince. He did a number of clever thought experiments and published it as an inevitable truth. That’s brilliant! And original.

As for art, well, we could look at Jimi Hendrix…

What’s wrong with the article is the trite assumption that schools have some simple and global ethos.

There’s quite a bit more that’s wrong with the article.

“So if you accept that two plus two equals four, you’re a Platonist.”

“And if a teacher dares tell a student that his or her work is bad, the teacher gets the sack.”

“For this reason, no decent artist worries about originality.”

The essay is a masterwork of overgeneralization. What we can say about the artistry or originality of professionals may apply to what we teach schoolchildren, but not across the board. Originality, as has been mentioned above, is sometimes most effective when it is applied within strict constraints: it doesn’t surprise me that the essay doesn’t mention, say, Miles Davis rather than rock and roll icons. I also get the impression that the author of the essay has a very clear prescriptionist understanding of quality in art and science, and that his understanding might not match everyone else’s.

I haven’t read Plato in a long time, but none of this sounds much like the Plato I remember.

Enough of this stupidity.
Bach did not create ideas, he was not an intellectual, he was a brilliant craftsman and a brilliant man whose work made manifest the preoccupations of life and of his age. Shakespeare was a craftsman first: he wanted to write well. But anyone who writes well, who does anything well, produces an idiosyncratic version of that skill to which he or she aspires, and Shakespeare was a brilliantly observant, not ‘creative’ man.

You don’t concentrate on the ideas, but on the craft, and the ideas make themselves apparent. Therein lies the brilliant honesty of art. Manet’s strength was that he was not a chyprocrite in an age of hypocrisy, not that he ‘had ideas’.
Of course I’m talking as always to technocrats who would argue that Jules Verne was a great novelist because he was creative enough to invent the submarine. Anyone else here want to write another paragraph on Dune?

The Stones were a bunch of middle class British kids who wanted to play music of working class American blacks, and they found a way to do it in a way that music critics and college professors find fascinating. But the Stones were neither music critics not college professors, so how could they be smart enough to do it?They must have begun with an idea? Well, no, they began with a guitar.
Oh, the aporias of the imagination. Oh, the fucking impotence of the modern academic mind. Please stick to the hard sciences like economics and politics and leave the arts to the rest of us.

“How many of you want to be poets” [half the class would raise their hands]
“How many of you want to write poetry?” [two or three hands would raise].

A poet is someone who writes poetry, just as a bachelor is an unmarried man. I doubt that half the students in your father’s class were so stupid as to not realize this until your father pointed this out to them. I submit to you that your father’s cute little story about his students was, in fact, invented to prove some obscure point, as professors and fathers are wont to do. And in making shit up, he, too, was being creative.

“Jules Verne was a great novelist because he was creative enough to invent the submarine.”

I’ve quoted this out of context, I know, but I’m geekish enough to insist on pointing out that 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was published 1869-1870, while the Confederate submarine Hunley sunk USS Housatonic in 1864. The Hunley, in turn, had many predecessors, including an unsuccesful American submarine attack against a British warship during the Revolution.

Another chain of unoriginal gropings toward the Platonic ideal, I guess . . .

I’ll remember to find another stock reference next time.
thank you.

The Guardian? Daniel D stole my damn job.
And nobody here has ever accused me of being a Platonist;

I never said the article wasn’t silly, but the comments on creativity were pretty good. It would’ve been nice if someone here thought about just when and where the author went of the rails. That would be an interesting discussion.

Describe the tension betwen craft and individual expression;
the tension between ideals of craft and science.
How does craft stand opposed to notions of individualism?
etc.

that’s the fun stuff.

There are pieces that end up in Pseud’s Corner, and pieces whose apparent intent is to end up in Pseud’s Corner. This is the Platonic ideal of a Pseud’s Corner piece.

“How many of you want to be poets” [half the class would raise their hands]

“How many of you want to write poetry?” [two or three hands would raise].

That sounds like Degas’ conversation with Mallarmé.

Italics, Seth, Italics.

“That sounds like Degas’ conversation with Mallarmé.”
All art is imitation

The tension between craft and individualism? I guess you can say that poetry is a lot more fascist than novel writing.

The Telegraph piece is drivel, not worth the effort of analysis. CT’s standards are virtually always much higher than this.

>You don’t concentrate on the ideas, but on the craft, and the ideas make themselves apparent.

I always, once long ago when I had a bit of musical talent, liked to listen to popular songs* that weren’t pure guitar-based and try to determine, before hunting down an album cover, if the primary songwriter was a guitarist or a keyboard player.

I had a very high hit rate. Chicago was a group where you could see the difference in thought brought on by the instrument the main composer doodled out the tune on.

*Popular songs to me then meant stuff you heard on the radio attributed to, say, “a bunch of middle class British kids” in opposition to like Frank Sinatra who was just the singer in front of some hired hands that were just the band playing something that was written by a third absent party and arrainged by a fourth person.

It is a common error in reading Plato’s dialogues to mistake the views expressed by any single character for the views of the author. But surely it is deliberately misleading to claim that Plato said “Somewhere there’s a perfect table in the sky.”

In fact, the person who said that was the unnamed second stranger in Plato’s dialogue “The Philosopher”. This claim is made in an argument against Socrates’ more nuanced views about the forms.

“But later modernism began to require that artists and intellectuals not only describe the present and the past but predict the future. And that’s caused a lot of problems.”

sorry