#18 – If generosity were free, we’d have to redefine what love is
In Transformation Pie #22 we explore what happens when creativity stops being automatic and costs us something again. From Angine de Poitrine to the Loewe Craft Prize, a journey through imperfection, human fragility, and new forms of creative value.
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If generosity were free, we would have to redefine what love is. Or friendship.
Because the very value of generosity is that it costs you something: money, effort, sacrifice.
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If we had a checking account with no limit, all the time in the world, if we had an army of assistants doing all your favors for you, it wouldn’t be friendship. So, what would true friendship be? What new things would it be based on?
Let me make the analogy another way.
If ideas were free, we would have to redefine what creativity is.
If we had a bunch of assistants doing the work for you, what would creativity be? What other things would it be based on?
You may have heard of Angine de Poitrine. They're a crazy band. Both in their performances and their music. There are many ways to define their music; strange, bad, original, different, unpredictable. Musicologists call it microtonal mathematical rock. These are notes you won't find on a piano. Music, after all, that AI can't make, and whose effort is recognized by the legion of fans they've gained in a very short time. Is this the new creativity?
Something similar happened recently on Amaia's Tiny Desk. She started playing the flute using the leg of a chair as a tube. It could be the search for new sounds, but it almost seems more like the search for a place trying to get away from the automatic.
I read that fanzines are making a comeback. But in a different way. Shipments in boxes with handmade bindings, loose cardstock, gifts for subscribers. The boxes become new editorial vehicles with content you can't find online.
- text: Snatch is a good example of a sports fanzine for the LGBTQ community.
Is that the new editorial creativity? I don't know, it could be the beginning of something, but it also indicates a search.
This week the winner of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize was chosen. This year it was a South Korean ceramicist with a piece that celebrates imperfection, something many brands are starting to emphasize with much more human identities and less likely to be a product of AI slop.
Is the amplification of imperfection, of human fragility, the new creativity?
It's too early to know, but it's clear that there's a collective journey toward a new way of adding value that's starting to deconstruct artistic tools in order to rebuild them in a different way.
Just like what happened with photography and abstract painting, it would seem, and hopefully it will be the case, that technology is going to draw out the best version of humans, taking them to new heights of expression.
Because in the end, just like friendship, true creativity will always need to cost us something.
