Art and its mythologies
a relativist view
pp. 189-208
in: Joseph Margolis, Michael Krausz, Richard M. Burian (eds), Rationality, relativism and the human sciences, Berlin, Springer, 1986Abstract
This essay concerns the nature of creative products and the creative life from the creator's point of view, formulated within the constraints of a non-foundationalist and critical relativist epistemology. Central to the understanding of the creative life are our reflections about who we are and what activities we value. These reflections and motivations may be formulated as a personal mythology1 that helps guide a creator's actions. We continually locate ourselves in such personal mythologies, which we periodically reformulate. Personal mythologies help to make sense of the activity of art making for the creator, and they help to locate the creator in relation to his practice. They are philosophies of creative life, and they motivate and orient the practitioner and the practice. Two general incongruent personal mythologies are considered here: a product-centered view and a process-centered view. The product-centered mythology holds that the principal aim of the creative enterprise is the production of certain types of things with certain valued properties, for consumption or admiration. In contrast, the processcentered mythology holds that the principal aim of the creative enterprise lies in the quality of the process itself; the things produced are merely vehicles for the process. One can add that the process aims at self-development of a certain kind.