Descending Ashtray

I have been thinking pretty deeply lately. I have never been a spiritual person, but I have always been aware of my own mortality, and while 27 isn’t exactly old, I am drawing near to 30. Albert Einstein once said, “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.”

I think because of my lack of spirituality, a “great contribution” to art has always been an important goal of mine. Sometimes I think about the sheer numbers of people on whose genetic shoulders I now stand, how many thousands of ancestors whose energies led to me - well, it’s a responsibility to excel.

And then there is the weight of those who will come after, or perhaps it is their approval I seek. I want to have mattered, to have someone 200 years from now look back and say, “His work resonates still, is relevant, is timeless.”

I am thinking now of some recent museum visits, looking at specimens of South American pottery, pieced carefully back together 3500 years after its creation, 3400 years after it was broken and discarded. The artist’s name has been lost to time, but the work remains, now a museum piece, but still a human relic, something that still speaks to me across the years, from within the climate-controlled box.

Is posterity a respectable motivator? Is it a good reason to create?

Now let me come back to the second part of Einstein’s statement. That “30″ number. I am thinking now of a great article I read recently in Wired magazine, Daniel Pink’s, “What Kind of Genius Are You?”

Fun fact: Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon appears in art history textbooks more than any other 20th Century work of art.

In it, he relates David Galenson’s research into the two types of creativity, what he calls “conceptual innovators,” like Picasso, who created an art movement at a young age, and “experimental innovators,” whose best work comes after a lifetime of experiments and failures. His example for the latter is Jackson Pollock, whose best work comes in the last 5 years of his life, and whose earliest work probably wouldn’t be hanging in galleries were it not signed “Jackson Pollock.”

So the question now is (assuming you subscribe to this either/or mentality), which are you? Young innovator or experimental innovator?

Based on my artistic career thus far (and even my graphic design career), I would say I am probably in the experimenter camp. I enjoy where I am now, creating art as I am inspired and living a very pleasant life. I have not as yet entered the permanent collection of MoMA, but I still aspire to, still believe I am capable of that level of work.

I am thinking now of one of my favorite artists, H.C. Westermann, whose great recognition came extremely late in life, and has mostly gained prominence posthumously. I think that would be okay with me, too. I don’t think I would like the spotlight, flitting around the world to speaking engagements. I want to create because I want to create, not because I am obligated.

Do you want to be famous? Why or why not?