Art and vision

You can be an artist only if you have that singularity and vision, that obsession and determination. If you are willing to compromise, in particular, be willing to be told what to do by market forces or by people who filter information and manipulate your talent, you’re not really an artist, you are a work for hire.

— Bob Ezrin, quoted in “Too busy for Jagger” by Eddino Abdul Hadi in The Straits Times: Life!, 23 May 2012, p. C10.

Also, see “Leadership (Part II)” and watch a very brilliant commencement address delivered by Neil Gaiman.

musee.sg: Curating creativity.

I don't know why this is considered creative? But it was the first Google Image search result and it looked eye-catching so I thought I'd use it.

So I’m trying something a little different this year with my students.

In the past, whenever I wanted to show them something creative to students for the purposes of school work (and also just to generally expose them to good aesthetics, intelligent design, etc.), I’d e-mail them to ‘push’ the info to them.

That doesn’t work because students don’t always check their mail (or e-mail from me tends to be ignored… I don’t condone this but I don’t blame them either.)

Also, we have a school-based Content Management System (CMS), but students have to ‘pull’ the info from the site.

And knowing how human beings are like i.e. we follow the path of least resistance, it ain’t gonna happen… (in this case.)

So based on some feedback several of my ex-students gave me last year, I thought I’d set up musee.sg in my own personal capacity to ‘curate creativity’.

I think teaching creative thinking isn’t enough; people also have to be immersed in a creative environment or at least exposed to creative things on a regular basis to become creative too.

So students and anyone who’s interested in this can:

I thought I’d use social media because it just pushes everything to the students who are always on Tumblr/Twitter/Facebook anyway.

BTW I’m developing this organically so everything’s a bit spartan now in terms of design and stuff.

Also, organic means that it might die or it might evolve, but what the hell – let’s see where this goes.

Appreciate any support if you can spare some!

Tragedy, comedy and societal ethics – How I Met Your Mother (S01E19)

Season 1, Episode 19 of How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) is great for teaching (or learning) the concepts of:

  • Tragedy and comedy (and the relationship between the two); and
  • Societal ethics, especially with regard to recent news that has been making headlines in Singapore.

I’d like to do an extended post on this that explains how and why the above-mentioned concepts can be taught/learnt.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time and I don’t think I’ll ever get back to doing this.

Nevertheless, I’m placing this post as a marker of my own thoughts and also if anyone else might be interested in this.

Further reading:

  • Fleming, Rudd. “Of Contrast Between Tragedy and Comedy.” The Journal of Philosophy 36.20 (1939): 543 – 553.

In other news, HIMYM is the new Entourage.