Replying to LO30193 --
Dear Organlearners,
Andrew Campbell < ACampnona@aol.com > wrote:
>If I were, say, offering a seminar at Green College, Oxford
>next year with the subject line, My Seven Years Living and
>Learning with the Organizational Development Community
>(aka 'you lot') I would have to say that OL and LO and all
>the others 'disciplines' have a very limited and 'self limiting'
>view of a/ what fine art is in the 21st C and b/ what fine art
>could accomplish for people in organizations in the 21st C.
Greetings dear Andrew,
Your comment made me wonder deeply. At present i think that art, like
science, is an end rather than the means to an end. In other words, they
cannot be made servile to any other purpose than the purpose for which
each is intended.
So what is the purpose of art? I think that the purpose of art is to
express any idea (simple or complex) through any medium such that it makes
an appeal to the creativity of other people while sustaining the
creativity of the artist. Thus art cannot be a tool to serve another
purpose too. For example, to make an artwork an investment is not the
purpose of art.
The purpose of science is for me also to articulate creative ideas, but
now on any relationship such that it can be tested at any place and any
time. Thus, like art, science cannot be a tool to serve also another
purpose. For example, the purpose of science cannot also be to sustain
technology.
Since art and science are ends and not the means to any end, they cannot
be made tools for organisations. People in organisations should rather
practice art and science for their respective purposes so that their
creativity can benefit from such accomplishments. Perhaps my view of art
and science are too limited, but that is how i feel.
>I think it is about time we were, all, felt, big enough, brave
>enough to speak our minds about this incapacitating fear
>that is pervasive. I smell it on the local stage, on the national
>stage and the global stage, I smell it in small organization,
>medium sized ones and large ones.
Andrew, do you mean the "incapacitating fear" which prevents people
creating fine art or science? If it is the case, then what causes this
"incapacitating fear"? When i think of the Digestor as model for
self-organisation close to equilibrium, see The Digestor LO21272
< http://www.learning-org.com/99.04/0167.html >
with its graphs at
< http://www.learning-org.com/graphics/9904Graph1.GIF >
< http://www.learning-org.com/graphics/9904Graph2.GIF >
< http://www.learning-org.com/graphics/9904Graph3.GIF >
then it is existing art and science which are already so complex that they
scare the wits out of people. This happens because they did not have
capable mentors who guided each of them step by step in exploring the
actual purpose of art or purpose of science. In other words, our
educational systems are at error here. And believe me, here at our
university the majority of students resist in doing things if such things
do not serve their careers bent on making money.
When i tell many a student that art and science each is explored according
to its purpose to benefit primarily a person's creativity, then he/she
stares at me with blank eyes because i said something incomprehensible.
Why? They have been taught that they can study art or science to make a
career out of it like any other profession such as a doctor, lawyer or
engineer. How dare i contradict what they had been taught over a dozen
years at school? Now wonder their entropy (fitness) landscape has become
so flat. How can they make it rugged other than by creativity with its
digestive and bifurcative assymptotes?
>I am always reminded when I confront the blankness of the
>page or the canvas that the greatest art is first, not there, then,
>it is there and then, it is not there again.
It is liveness ("becoming-being"), one of the 7Es (seven essentialities of
creativity) which "speaks" to you as artist. It should also "speak" to any
scientist when doing science. But why does it not "speak" to those looking
at artwork or sciencework? Because their imagination cannot follow the
creative course given by the clues in the artwork or sciencework. Their
imagination fails because it has never been cultivated in the first place.
>" - Strangely enough this (aspect of) creativity is undervalued
>in science. We all realise that of Shakespeare, Beethoven, or
>van Gogh had died soon after birth, no one else would have
>achieved what they did. Is this also true for scientists?...."
Yes.
>Art is a miracle of time. A miracle without end.
The miracle of creation, first experienced by the artist and then by every
other responsive explorer of that artwork. The same goes for science!
Thank you Andrew for setting my thinking in action. How about responding,
especially when you disagree with what i have written?
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@postino.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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