Vol. 7: Catching the Creative Bug.

A weekly newsletter on our modern Renaissance, the issues and ideas driving today's creative work.

Creative energy is contagious.

From my Substack,?Renaissance Plan.?Read the full article here .

I’ve always been fascinated by the period in Hollywood from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. I’ve written about it before here, I’m sure. To me, it represented a uniquely prosperous era of creative work, as fuel poured onto an emerging film and television industry, while the British invasion spurred a musical cold war - er, healthy competition - with American rock-and-roll icons. Jakob Dylan, the son of Bob Dylan, who is largely regarded as one of the greatest songwriters of all time, produced a documentary called “Echo in the Canyon” some years back. In it, he interviews many of the characters of that time, including David Crosby (The Byrds), Eric Clapton, Michelle Phillips (The Mamas & the Papas) and more.

It’s worth a watch if you enjoy that style of music, but it also points to the immense impact that artistic communities have on elevating the quality and frequency with which we create work. Laurel Canyon, above Hollywood, acted as both a physical and metaphorical hot bed of production during that time. When Clapton was struggling to find a hook for a song he was writing, Paul McCartney was just a few doors away and could walk over and help him out. By day these now legendary bands would write music, and at night they’d descend down the hill to the Sunset strip to perform (and do whatever else they were doing at that time).

Throughout history, pockets of explosive creativity and expression have occurred when artists found themselves together, physically - and could both collaborate with and compete with their contemporaries - pushing each other to achieve new levels of production. The “Renaissance” - which is the namesake of this newsletter - was a period marked by two distinct qualities.

1. People returned to cities following the bubonic plague, collaborating in places like Milan, Italy in close proximity again.
2. People became skeptical of traditional ways of thinking about work - they were newly unafraid to express themselves in myriad, unconventional ways because they saw their peers doing the same.

Of course, we can look at so many other pockets of “Renaissance” throughout history. From the Belle époque in 19th century Paris, to the literary greats that followed World War 1 in the “Roaring ‘20s” (think Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, etc.), to the tech revolution in Silicon Valley through the 70s and 80s, on and on. People are motivated by the places they inhabit and by what their peers are creating.

Yes, many of these pockets that we know are headlined by generational talent, artists that transcend time and remain within the cultural lexicon. Still, the fundamental principle holds: People reach higher levels of creativity when they are together.

In today’s modern Renaissance, there are of course the traditional physical communities of people producing art. However, the paradigm has shifted. Film isn’t all done in LA. Music isn’t all done in Nashville. Tech isn’t all done in the Bay Area. And creative people are increasingly gathering in digital places, exposing themselves to new perspectives from peers of all cultural and regional identities like never before.

Creative energy is contagious, and though we have become painfully accustomed to staying apart to protect our physical health, if we want to realize our creative potential, we have to come back together and expose ourselves to the “bug.”

Where do you derive your creative energy? Who are the people that make up your community? Finding them may be the key to getting to where you want to go.

Read the full article and subscribe?here .

Community thoughts.

Who owns AI-generated art? Maybe we all do.

A big element of the proliferation of AI will be how companies and artists can use the technology to produce various forms of artwork at scale. It is a central issue within the ongoing strikes and negotiations in Hollywood. And now, artists looking to protect the value of their craft may have gotten a win. A District Court judge ruled this week that AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted, saying that "human beings are an ‘essential part of a valid copyright claim.’"

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Are video calls bad for creativity?

The article I wrote above came about as I've thought a lot about the value of being in person with my creative friends. I do miss simpler, pre-Covid times in my own life, where I spent many hours per week surrounded by comedians, workshopping bits and characters and ideas. Research from Nature, and reported on by Scientific American last year, indicates "that video calls, as opposed to in-person meetings, reduce creative collaboration and the generation of novel ideas." Now, Zoom, a company that exploded in popularity during the pandemic and is, of course, deeply invested in success for remote work, is asking their own employees to come back to the office. It is critical for us to be together to do our best work, the trick will be figuring out the "how often" and "where" that works for each kind of role and company.

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Wishing you a creative week ahead!