Consume like an artist: on diversifying content
Enhancing creativity and artistic development through a diverse consumption of content
A few days ago, I discovered this video called ‘consume like an artist’. As I am looking to develop my own artistic eye, I found the message interesting so I thought I’d share it.
The gist is this: consume a wider variety of content from different genres, artists, and periods of time. This practice allows you to be inspired by seemingly unrelated work and create new creative connections between unrelated topics.
Rotate your crops
Monoculture, growing a single crop, year after year has increased chances of spreading pests and diseases. Crop rotation, growing a variety of crops, improves your soil. In the same way, consuming a variety of content enriches your own art.
Illusion of change
Content discovery powered by algorithms can sometimes give the illusion of consuming different content when they are variations of the same thing. Take Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlists: it feels like you are discovering new music, but it’s often just adjacent to what you already listen to and not much different. It’s both an advantage of the algorithm and a pitfall. an advantage because discovering adjacent music is great and needed, but it’s definitely not where you will discover completely new music.
The algorithms are very good at predicting what will make you stay longer on the app, and that’s usually something as similar as possible to things you’ve already watched.
The Mouth of Krishna
Photography duo Albarrán Cabrera have a great example of inspiration drawn from different content. Their series, the Mouth of Krishna, is inspired by the Hindu story of Krishna. As an infant, Krishna is accused of having eaten dirt from the ground. His mother, Yashoda, goes to him to check what he has in his mouth, and this is what she sees, as described by Albarrán Cabrera:
She sees in Krishna’s mouth the whole, complete, entire timeless universe. All the stars and planets of space and the distances between them; all the lands and seas of the earth and the life in them; she sees all the days of yesterday and all the days of tomorrow; she sees all ideas and all emotions, all pity and all hope, and the three strands of matter; not a pebble, candle, creature, village or galaxy is missing, including herself and every bit of dirt in its truthful place.
This was a nice reminder to diversify my content intake without relying too much on algorithm curation. If you have any recommendations, hit reply!
Super interesting read as always :) For further diversity of content, I recommend checking out @shwinnabegobrand on Instagram. Lots of fascinating breakdowns of consumer marketing!