Category: Arts Law

the business of creativity

I’ve had several conversations with friends and clients over the last few days specifically addressing how to frame the discussion of law, business/art, creativity and spirit in some understandable form. The phrase that keeps coming up and helping people understand what this is about seems to be “The Business of Creativity” where the law element is included in the business/art discussion and the spirit element is rolled into the creativity discussion. I don’t know yet if this really works for me yet because I don’t know if I want to down-play the spirit discussion at all. Maybe I won’t have to short-change the spirit, but I’m not seeing how “the business of creativity” captures everything I want to say. It definitely captures a sub-set VERY well. I pay the bill by helping people with the business of creativity, but there’s more to it.

I’ve been thinking about negative space – the space between objects and classifications. If you think about the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc a little bit, it’s easy to see that these numbers that we think of as “whole” are really an infintesimally small point along the number line. There is an individual infinity between 1 and 2, another between 2 and 3. So, when we think about the “whole” numbers, we’re missing a very great deal of good stuff in the spaces between. I don’t want to make that mistake when discussing spirit, creativity, business/art, and law.

I don’t want to get so focused on the labels or “poles” that the relationships between the poles are not given full attention. It’s the overlap that’s interesting. Perhaps it’s the overlap that gets closest to “real.”

In effect, these poles are only “real” when they are relating to each other, and relating to a whole host of other concepts that are outside of my focus. You could say they are in relation to each other, but maybe the “relation” should be spelled “realation” in this discussion. How about “inrealation” as a unifying label for the discussion? I like that. Inrealation.

What do you think?  Post a comment…

Event Schedule

I just posted a whole bunch of new workshops and seminars that I’ll be presenting for the Fort Collins/Larimer Small Business Development Center in 2008.  Of course the dates and times may change a little, but it’s a pretty full schedule of topics from business formation, to copyright and trademark, to effective contracting.

You can watch the events calendar at www.guidingvalue.com or go to the SBDC Web site.  All fees (something like $25/pop) are set, charged, and kept by the SBDC.

scrap-booking

No, I’ve not taken up the hobby…

As a professional designer (BFA in Graphic Design with a dozen years as a designer, art director, creative director, etc.), I really had a fairly snobby opinion of the whole scrap-booking thing – until recently.

A friend of mine recently shared the “One Little Word” scrap-booking Web site with me. Sure, some of the pieces aren’t my style, but the thing that amazed me was some of the VERY high-quality conceptual graphic design that’s going on around these images. There are some of these artists (I’ll call them “artists” and “designers” now, where I would have previously called them “hobbyists”) have a natural sense of typography that I’ve sometimes longed for in formal design students. It’s really good stuff, and I stand corrected in my snobbery.

Keep up the great work ladies!