Fitness in art

At what point is something different?

Relative (and blissful) ignorance helps the beholder see things as new and different all of the time, but to the well-educated, many of those differences are invisible.

For example, young artists spill their hearts out only to hear from critics that it's been done like that before. In this way critics help to push artist to find something different each generation.

Through trial and error, offense and defense, conviction and education, the best new artists create combinations of elements that feel unique to them and tirelessly push them forward through their critics internally and externally with the hope that what's left in the end is a complete enough collection to be worthy of being called a new species.

Like any species, fitness and its mortal partner Tenacity determine whether it lives or dies.

Teams of equals

It's funny how the idea of a team doesn't really change with age. For children, if all the players on a team appear equal to one another, a beautiful and age-appropriate interdependent dance happens towards achieving a common goal.

Appearing equal to one another as people get older is where it gets more complicated.

With a group of adults, the possible permutations of ideas about privacy, collaboration, reputation and risk among teammates quickly approaches an incomprehensible number simply because of the amount of life lived. It's inconceivable to think that a team of equals could ever exist among adults.

Children don't go looking for equals. Children simply attempt to make a team work because their common goal is not complicated by learned behaviors of privacy, politics, reputation and risk. Children are less interested in finding a team of equals than they are in achieving a common goal. Each teammate plays a role, and sometimes that role is to sit out so long as the common goal is met.

As this planet becomes evermore interdependent, our future heroes will be the magicians who create goals where all humans can feel part of the team without having to subject themselves to the impossible task of attempting to build teams of equals (that's what droids will be for).

As insensitive as this sounds, feelings are hurt not because the left out player is un-equal to the others but rather because that player was in a time and place where the goals of that group were not consciously inclusive. Changing the goals to be inclusive does not mean a dumbing down of the games people play and the markets in which they take place, it means changing the way we educate humans starting as early as kindergarten.

Educating for inclusivity means teaching deeper systems thinking, studying chaos, patterns, ambiguity, and new narratives that help us to imagine humans with a capacity for empathy that is 10-fold what we have today. Our imagination has always come first, and with it follows goals that make fiction a reality.

Pre-mirror reflection

In the time before mirrors we may not have see our physical selves but for the fleeting reflections from calm bodies of water.

Like a blind person who's hearing becomes more sensitive, or a def person who's eyes eventually learn to 'hear', how was our perception of self and others different than today?

From what mental estimate did a pre-mirror age self-portrait artist paint? Furthermore, when they finished how would they have know if it resembled them? There is no metric for truth here. It seems strange to rely on the fact that only other people could identify you as you.

The person that you see in the mirror or in a photograph may not be the person that other people see. But how are we to know? Artists brave enough to paint themselves over and over again are evidence that what we see in the mirror may be little more that what we imagine we are seeing. A mirror is a mirror and yet our 4th grade self-portrait is different to our 12th grade one and still different to our grad school version. Skills aside, same person, different mirror.

For some it may not be a mirror discussion so much as one of medium. The medium of the self-portrait is one that cleverly side steps some judgement because it's so personal. For example, Frieda Kahlo showed the many sides in every person by showing them in herself. Perhaps it freed her from the inevitable criticism of holding a mirror up to others for whom their reflections were not something they want to see.