To create, one must be a critic
I’m about a third of the way through Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act: A Way of Being.
It’s great stuff in the spiritual sense. Rubin, who famously doesn’t know much about actually playing music and yet has collaborated with rock and hip-hop royalty to make music all the same, is full of all sorts of philosophical wisdom. I’m not sure I’d trust him with a grocery list, but he seems to understand and articulate well the big stuff - what it is to create, that create is a verb not a noun, that craft is perpetually in pursuit of what you can dream up, and so on.
I’ll probably have something longer to write when I’ve finished the book, but in the short-term, I wanted to share a favorite passage from what I’ve read so far.
In a chapter titled Submerge (The Great Works), Rubin says:
“The objective is not to learn to mimic greatness, but to calibrate our internal meter for greatness. So we can better make the thousands of choices that might ultimately lead to our own great work.”
Rubin is speaking of how we engage with great works of art, literature, music, film, and so on, and he is not really saying anything all that new. What is this sentiment, but a remix of and justification for the maxim that all artists steal.
Still, I loved seeing it written this way. I spend a not insignificant portion of my spare time engaging with the work of filmmakers. It might seem like a hobby, and it has often felt that way to me, but more and more it feels like an unpaid part of my work and craft. It seems more and more like something I need to do to keep making things and to eventually make something that might be great.
I don’t think I’ve ever met someone in my field who doesn’t have their own version of my side project. It might not come in the format of a blog or be oriented around cinema, but to a person they all have something like this in their life. If they didn’t - if I couldn’t eventually uncover what that thing was - I wouldn’t trust them as a creative professional.
And that’s because to be someone who makes things, you must engage actively - obsessively even - with how things get made. Understanding how things get made means grasping the balance between vision and execution. After all, an idea isn’t worth much until it can be brought to life - until an audience can engage with it.
There’s an episode in one of the last few seasons of Mad Men where Don Draper sneaks out of the office to go see the newly released film Planet of the Apes. The conventional reading of this behavior, given the context of the series, is that Don is once again skirting the rules and avoiding accountability. While the rest of his colleagues and underlings work, the mercurial genius is engaging in a form of selfish escape. Other days, it’s an extramarital affair or a three-martini lunch, but today it’s Charlton Heston.
I never felt that way about this particular sequence, though I would never argue with the idea that Don is selfish, aloof and generally unbound by common decency and consideration for others.
In this very specific case, I would argue Don was working, in a very loose sense of the word. In this line of work, even when you’re not in the process of making something, you’re in some process of tuning. Creativity is an act, yes, and, Rubin hints, it is a perpetual one.