Creativity
Half a million secrets
Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas, of frailty and heroism playing out silently in the lives of people all around us. Frank Warren from Post Secret tells the story of over 500,000 secrets submitted....and he reminds us of the value of secrets, of keeping them, of sharing them and of the truths they contain.
On art, psychoanalysis and insanity
This South Bank Show on art and insanity is really interesting and includes some fascinating insights from psychoanalyst Adam Phillips about the relationship between creativity and madness. Each part is less than 10 minutes in length.
When what you are doing isn’t working…
I've been interested in Professor Michael Wesch's teaching methods for some time and have followed his use of social media in the classroom (via social media naturally). So I was fascinated to read this Chronicle of Higher Education piece on Wesch's decision to 'reboot' on hearing that his ideas aren't working as well for others as they are for him.
The professor's popular talks have detailed his experiments teaching with Twitter, YouTube videos, collaborative Google Docs—and they present a general critique of ...
Sixty museums in search of a purpose
András Szántó's analysis of the mission statements of 60 museums makes for interesting reading. The accompanying Wordle is a graphic account of the most commonly used words in mission statements (which is also interesting for what is omitted).
Composing a mission statement isn’t as easy as it sounds. Should a mission describe what a museum is doing, or what it should be doing? Is it about tangible goals to which institutions are held accountable, or Platonic ideals to which they merely ...
What happens when an NGO admits failure?
International aid groups make the same mistakes over and over again. At TEDxYYC David Damberger uses his own engineering failure in India to call for the development sector to publicly admit, analyze, and learn from their missteps.
Oh so much to learn from this sort talk from David Damberger....Organisations defend so rigorously against failure (or admitting it at least). Its worth speculating about what our systems might be like if we admitted to being 'ordinary' rather than aiming for spectacular results ...
On regret
Kathryn Shultz is a wrongologist and in this TED talk she encourages us to learn to live with regret and the lessons it can teach us We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly. It reminds us that we know we can do better.
Viewing art is an irrational process
So now there is research to confirm what many have always known - our reaction to art is irrational. We really don't know what we're looking at and we want to believe that what we are seeing is the genuine article.
Our study shows that the way we view art is not rational, that even when we cannot distinguish between two works, the knowledge that one was painted by a renowned artist makes us respond to it very differently.
The fact that ...
Making the case for the arts – case conference
On Thursday 30th November I will be presenting some of my work at the monthly case conference at IPTAR. The notice is below and it would be great to see you there.
The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR)
Center for Socio-Analytic Studies
Monthly Case Conference
Wednesday, November 30
11:30-1:00
Annette Clancy, MSc
Organizational Consultant, Psychotherapist &
Doctoral Candidate University of Bath (England) School of Management
'In the so-called arts it has always been acknowledged that many of the things we value most — the gods and God, love ...
It’s ok not to like things…and feel alright about it
I hereby nominate this video and this song to serve as an invocation to every professional arts conference in 2012. It's short. It's to the point. It carries an important message. And it sticks with you (boy, does it stick with you). Hat tip Andrew Taylor
He made things beautiful
It's not possible to be in the world this week without encountering the many reflections on Steve Jobs' life and death. One Twitter colleague commented that Jobs had been a significant part of his small child's life though Toy Story, the animated film his child watched repeatedly on his father's iPad. As a Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad user I'm a member of the self-confessed Apple generation (although I only took the belated leap about 3 years ago). What so ...
