Friday, February 22, 2013

Creative Teamwork

"Creativity is not democratic" is written above the door of the Chanel Studio in Paris, where Karl Lagerfeld works. He was not the one who put that dictum there, but he certainly has internalized it. There's a lot of truth in that statement, a maxim for the theater. Actors, stage hands and musicians need to be told what they have to do. They may hate a director who acts like a dictator, but they despair of one who shows indecision. In the late 60's and 70's there was a time in Europe when some theaters practiced "grassroots-democracy", a period that was artistically barren. On all stages a sigh of relief was heard, when in the 80's directors started again to take over responsibility. In the record business the days of Clive Davis, Sigi Loch and Ahmet Ertegun will always be remembered as the creative years of pop music. Those were record bosses who had the guts to invest in a production they liked, even if the rest of the company - especially the marketing guys - had turned it down.

1 comment:

  1. http://iambrianjung.com/rant/2010/11/15/creativity-is-not-democratic/:

    “Anyone can have an idea. But few can be creative, and even few can have relevant ideas. Creativity is the ability to take an idea, to understand feasibility and think through the idea beyond the very very topline super abstract level and turn it into something tangible and something relevant.”

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