What Makes Art "Useful" to People?

Kaizen Creativity: The Science of Creativity & Innovation

There are two components to every creative idea: Usefulness and uniqueness. Both can be gray areas for people. What makes something useful is subjective. What’s useful to me isn’t necessarily useful to another person.

Artwork is a great example. While I recognize that abstract forms of art are highly valued by some people, I can’t actually see the value in it myself. To me, they seem like blotches of paint with no real purpose. But others see beauty in them. Neither of us are right or wrong. What’s useful is entirely subjective.

So what makes art useful? In most cases, how useful artwork is depends entirely on how meaningful it is to the person viewing it. This is true whether we’re talking about a visual painting, a piece of music, or industries like stand-up comedy.
Each area of art has wildly different ways of arriving at meaning, but they all still share this same foundation. To be useful and important, art must have meaning behind it.
As you’re creating today, think about what usefulness and meaningfulness mean in your specific industry. We don’t have to create new ideas and hope that others find them meaningful. Start with something meaningful and design the entire idea around that. With something meaningful at the core of your creative idea, you can then work backwards to create your art. Start with WHY you’re creating art in the first place, then figure out WHAT you actually want to create.
Kaizen Question:

• How does your industry generally define usefulness?
• What is a less-obvious way that people in your industry find something useful? (i.e., stand-up comedians can make a deeper point, rather than simply get laughs)

LINKS:
Facebook.com/KaizenCreativity
JaredVolle.com/Podcast (useful links)

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