Saturday, September 21, 2013

Indescision as creativity

In 2012, the Fryderyk Chopin Museum in Warsaw exhibited "Chopin at his most indecisive", showing how Chopin continually revised his works with new versions and annotations.

The exhition webpage states:

Nowadays, in most instances, the successive stages in a creative process are impossible to distinguish. We work on documents that overwrite changes as we go along, and electronic texts deprive us of any tangible evidence of the effort and time put into our work, which in previous times were documented on paper. And yet the creative process always remains the same. Illumination, idea, chance or trial, then the first attempt, and so a sketch (where one rarely starts from the beginning), a working text, and so real work, and (if al. goes well) a final version, which we still most often want to improve. And that was how Chopin worked.

The curator of the Chopin Museum, Maciej Janicki, believes that this indecision can be a sign of creative strength rather than weakness:

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