SINGULARITY: A CONSIDERATION ON CREATIVE VIRTUE
Editorial for Mesciu Gigi Spring / Summer 2023
The canonical Nicomachean Ethics examine different moral virtues and how they function in an individual’s life and their pursuit of happiness. In the treatise, one particular virtue Aristotle looks at is magnanimity, which means greatness of soul. He holds magnanimity as “a sort of adornment of the moral virtues; for it makes them greater, and it does not arise without them.” In the pursuit of true, beautiful human expression, the artistic virtue of singularity adopts a similar role. Singularity demonstrates the individuality of a work, that that entity is composed of eccentricities and idiosyncrasies that are unique to that particular thing. When all other artistic virtues (simplicity, extravagance, subtlety, sublimity, etc.) are infused with singularity, it makes them greater. Art is the child of some spiritual doing; the consecration of one person’s bucket of blood, love, and fervor. When that individual’s singular bucket is poured out onto the canvas, the page or the garment, the composite begets something beautiful.
For art that exists in a more abstract and conceptual realm, singularity is potent and thus imperative. Rules in the high art, avant-garde world are unconstrained. Art is at the behest of the strange, often divergent, organically creative doing of the artist. Acceptance and approval are often ignored. In 1855, French painter Gustav Courbet introduced two paintings - Burial at Ornans and The Artist’s Studio - to the jury of the International Exhibition of Paris that were rejected upon presentation. His work, a departure from the prevailing Romanticist movement at the time, depicted peasants, rural laborers, and the poor working conditions to which they were subjected. These proletarian figures and the harsh environments that Courbet depicted were considered to be too ugly and vulgar for industry standards. The Burial at Ornans, a monumental work that was more than 10 ft tall and almost 22 ft wide, records a funeral in Courbet’s hometown of Ornans. The composition is crowded and disorganized and features a somber, subdued color palette. Historically, paintings of this scale had been reserved for religious or royal subjects. Courbet, however, ignored tradition and conjured an honest representation of what he saw and experienced. The result was a revolutionary ennoblement of the prosaic and the banal. Courbet’s work was so potent because it acquiesced to the reality of its author. He didn’t live in a world that could be expressed through a Romantic lens. He lived in a poor, working class environment, and he transposed that reality onto the canvas. His work was birthed through the singular lens of his individual human experience, irrespective of artistic conventions and the canon of work that existed around him and that which had preceded him for centuries.
While artists like Courbet have been vital in opening new avenues of self-expression for future generations, a robust dismissal of aesthetic and conceptual norms isn’t required for good art. Oftentimes, a blending of singularity with markers of familiarity and intelligibility will most adeptly challenge, energize, and enchant audiences. This rule goes especially for different forms of design. The renowned 20th century industrial designer Raymond Loewy (designer of an eclectic array of products/logos/innovations that includes the glass Coca Cola bottle, Air Force one logo, and Greyhound bus) created a rule for designers that aimed to solve the tricky job of presenting something new and innovative but also attuned to public sensibilities. This principle is called the ‘Most Advanced Yet Acceptable’ (MAYA) rule. With the MAYA rule, Loewy sought to give customers the most advanced design possible but still ensure that it wouldn’t be too experimental or avant-garde. The product had to be palatable enough for the customer to accept it, embrace it, and find it both aesthetically pleasing and functionally practical. Loewy believed that consumers are never ready for the best and most innovative product possible: “The adult public's taste is not necessarily ready to accept the logical solutions to their requirements if the solution implies too vast a departure from what they have been conditioned into accepting as the norm.” Unlike more quixotic, afunctional forms of art that are not in democratized service to consumers and respective audiences, works focused on design and practicality have to balance this difficult line of familiarity with singularity. Notes of innovation, accessibility, practicality, and beauty must come together to form a harmonious singularity.
In our current social and artistic economy, making singular art is challenging. This goes especially for fashion. At the heart of almost every creative entity in contemporary fashion – from influencer to fashion house – there is a collection of images that are in some sort of aesthetic and conceptual cooperation with one another that the entity, who compiled these images, is using as a midwife. These images are used to help the creator/artist/designer birth something: a new runway collection, a fit pic, a photography lookbook. Most people would call this collection of images a mood board but I opted for the abstruse, analogical option because mood boards have evolved over time. Mood boards are not simply physical pinboards that you hang up on a wall and pin various images on anymore. They are Pinterest boards or a photo album or a reservoir of saved Instagram posts. While they come in different forms, they have one evident commonality: images. Many, many images.
In 2003, Raf Simons released his aesthetically dark and apocalyptic yet conceptually pertinent menswear collection entitled Consumed. In the collection prospectus, he offered a reflection on the cultural climate: “Today’s living environment is about consuming as well as being consumed; some suggest this could lead to an apocalyptic end, while others, particularly younger generations, take this reality as their cue to create new, more viable and flexible personas.” The postmodern gripe of over-consumption and the burdens of late-stage capitalism can feel trite and exhausting, but as a 24 year-old Los Angeles resident living in the geographic nexus of this “consumed” cosmos, the conversation feels imperative to have. It seems we truly are, in fact, consumed. The reality of this collective consumption has strong implications on artistic and creative output. Artists are drowning. They are drowning in seeing other artists’ success on their social media feeds (whether real or feigned), they are drowning in their pursuit of external validation, they are drowning in their own thirst for an Anthony Fantano cosign or Anna Wintour commendation. Perhaps most damagingly, however, they are drowning in inspiration. Artists are engrossed in other artists’ work and the singularity of their voice and vision becomes muddled by this preoccupation. Philosopher and anthropologist René Girard describes man as an imitative being: "Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires." In the age of social media, where the work of artists are constantly imposed onto the collective creative conscience, more and more art slips into the ecosystem of vapid mimicry and re-creativity.
Devoting inspiration to things created by other people and submitting to the attention-molested epoch that we are living in can make for very good entertainment and very bad art. Entertainment is easy on the audience. It requires a presentation of the familiar and the acceptable with negligible room for the advanced and innovative. The product results in a special sort of re-creativity. Re-creative things are old gifts in new wrapping. They excite the recipient with new colors and patinas, but ultimately they offer no new prize or reward, merely a reassertion of truths. Art, on the other hand, reveals truths. It is a gift that often possesses no wrapping at all. It is laid raw, barren, and honest. It can be uncomfortable, upsetting, exhilarating. It is the synthesis of both internal and external stimuli, one’s own unique attempt at rendering the confluence of how that Cézanne painting and that one strange, sublime dream back in middle school made them feel.
When authentically welded from this fusion of domestic and foreign stimuli, art adopts a poignant singularity. Begotten from the symbiotic domains of the conscious self and living nature, singular works offer a visceral intimacy and a fidelity to universal truths. They are personal yet cosmic, as if their author is confiding a new secret about humanity to each devotee or admirer, something that makes the receiver of the secret feel less alone in their experience of humanity. Through this, the artistic process becomes a communal experience consummated through this communication between artist and audience.
Singular works are conceived through a complex but divine process. When a piece of singular art is produced, its conception is a beautiful manifestation of the sanctity of individual human life. When a work is singular and standing as its own unique entity, it serves as a relic of that specific individual’s existence. No one else could have created it because it was inspired by the unique experiences of that particular person. When audiences engage with the work and feel a connection to it, that is merely a reminder that we are much more alike than we realize. And so, the art culminates as something wholly individual and wholly collective, a beautiful composite that is just as harmonious as it is paradoxical.
For art that exists in a more abstract and conceptual realm, singularity is potent and thus imperative. Rules in the high art, avant-garde world are unconstrained. Art is at the behest of the strange, often divergent, organically creative doing of the artist. Acceptance and approval are often ignored. In 1855, French painter Gustav Courbet introduced two paintings - Burial at Ornans and The Artist’s Studio - to the jury of the International Exhibition of Paris that were rejected upon presentation. His work, a departure from the prevailing Romanticist movement at the time, depicted peasants, rural laborers, and the poor working conditions to which they were subjected. These proletarian figures and the harsh environments that Courbet depicted were considered to be too ugly and vulgar for industry standards. The Burial at Ornans, a monumental work that was more than 10 ft tall and almost 22 ft wide, records a funeral in Courbet’s hometown of Ornans. The composition is crowded and disorganized and features a somber, subdued color palette. Historically, paintings of this scale had been reserved for religious or royal subjects. Courbet, however, ignored tradition and conjured an honest representation of what he saw and experienced. The result was a revolutionary ennoblement of the prosaic and the banal. Courbet’s work was so potent because it acquiesced to the reality of its author. He didn’t live in a world that could be expressed through a Romantic lens. He lived in a poor, working class environment, and he transposed that reality onto the canvas. His work was birthed through the singular lens of his individual human experience, irrespective of artistic conventions and the canon of work that existed around him and that which had preceded him for centuries.
While artists like Courbet have been vital in opening new avenues of self-expression for future generations, a robust dismissal of aesthetic and conceptual norms isn’t required for good art. Oftentimes, a blending of singularity with markers of familiarity and intelligibility will most adeptly challenge, energize, and enchant audiences. This rule goes especially for different forms of design. The renowned 20th century industrial designer Raymond Loewy (designer of an eclectic array of products/logos/innovations that includes the glass Coca Cola bottle, Air Force one logo, and Greyhound bus) created a rule for designers that aimed to solve the tricky job of presenting something new and innovative but also attuned to public sensibilities. This principle is called the ‘Most Advanced Yet Acceptable’ (MAYA) rule. With the MAYA rule, Loewy sought to give customers the most advanced design possible but still ensure that it wouldn’t be too experimental or avant-garde. The product had to be palatable enough for the customer to accept it, embrace it, and find it both aesthetically pleasing and functionally practical. Loewy believed that consumers are never ready for the best and most innovative product possible: “The adult public's taste is not necessarily ready to accept the logical solutions to their requirements if the solution implies too vast a departure from what they have been conditioned into accepting as the norm.” Unlike more quixotic, afunctional forms of art that are not in democratized service to consumers and respective audiences, works focused on design and practicality have to balance this difficult line of familiarity with singularity. Notes of innovation, accessibility, practicality, and beauty must come together to form a harmonious singularity.
In our current social and artistic economy, making singular art is challenging. This goes especially for fashion. At the heart of almost every creative entity in contemporary fashion – from influencer to fashion house – there is a collection of images that are in some sort of aesthetic and conceptual cooperation with one another that the entity, who compiled these images, is using as a midwife. These images are used to help the creator/artist/designer birth something: a new runway collection, a fit pic, a photography lookbook. Most people would call this collection of images a mood board but I opted for the abstruse, analogical option because mood boards have evolved over time. Mood boards are not simply physical pinboards that you hang up on a wall and pin various images on anymore. They are Pinterest boards or a photo album or a reservoir of saved Instagram posts. While they come in different forms, they have one evident commonality: images. Many, many images.
In 2003, Raf Simons released his aesthetically dark and apocalyptic yet conceptually pertinent menswear collection entitled Consumed. In the collection prospectus, he offered a reflection on the cultural climate: “Today’s living environment is about consuming as well as being consumed; some suggest this could lead to an apocalyptic end, while others, particularly younger generations, take this reality as their cue to create new, more viable and flexible personas.” The postmodern gripe of over-consumption and the burdens of late-stage capitalism can feel trite and exhausting, but as a 24 year-old Los Angeles resident living in the geographic nexus of this “consumed” cosmos, the conversation feels imperative to have. It seems we truly are, in fact, consumed. The reality of this collective consumption has strong implications on artistic and creative output. Artists are drowning. They are drowning in seeing other artists’ success on their social media feeds (whether real or feigned), they are drowning in their pursuit of external validation, they are drowning in their own thirst for an Anthony Fantano cosign or Anna Wintour commendation. Perhaps most damagingly, however, they are drowning in inspiration. Artists are engrossed in other artists’ work and the singularity of their voice and vision becomes muddled by this preoccupation. Philosopher and anthropologist René Girard describes man as an imitative being: "Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires." In the age of social media, where the work of artists are constantly imposed onto the collective creative conscience, more and more art slips into the ecosystem of vapid mimicry and re-creativity.
Devoting inspiration to things created by other people and submitting to the attention-molested epoch that we are living in can make for very good entertainment and very bad art. Entertainment is easy on the audience. It requires a presentation of the familiar and the acceptable with negligible room for the advanced and innovative. The product results in a special sort of re-creativity. Re-creative things are old gifts in new wrapping. They excite the recipient with new colors and patinas, but ultimately they offer no new prize or reward, merely a reassertion of truths. Art, on the other hand, reveals truths. It is a gift that often possesses no wrapping at all. It is laid raw, barren, and honest. It can be uncomfortable, upsetting, exhilarating. It is the synthesis of both internal and external stimuli, one’s own unique attempt at rendering the confluence of how that Cézanne painting and that one strange, sublime dream back in middle school made them feel.
When authentically welded from this fusion of domestic and foreign stimuli, art adopts a poignant singularity. Begotten from the symbiotic domains of the conscious self and living nature, singular works offer a visceral intimacy and a fidelity to universal truths. They are personal yet cosmic, as if their author is confiding a new secret about humanity to each devotee or admirer, something that makes the receiver of the secret feel less alone in their experience of humanity. Through this, the artistic process becomes a communal experience consummated through this communication between artist and audience.
Singular works are conceived through a complex but divine process. When a piece of singular art is produced, its conception is a beautiful manifestation of the sanctity of individual human life. When a work is singular and standing as its own unique entity, it serves as a relic of that specific individual’s existence. No one else could have created it because it was inspired by the unique experiences of that particular person. When audiences engage with the work and feel a connection to it, that is merely a reminder that we are much more alike than we realize. And so, the art culminates as something wholly individual and wholly collective, a beautiful composite that is just as harmonious as it is paradoxical.