20 November 2013 Recently I was reading an article about Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi. There was a little quote by him that said "New? New is easy. Right is hard."
On one level, "new" is difficult, to see past what is done and make it unique. To make it your own. But on another level, new, for the sake of new, has no substance, no underpinning. Without effort, new is merely novel. The art world, these days, seems so taken with new. "Right", on the other hand, seems much deeper. Whether it is "right" to the artist or right to the answer of a problem, right has a quality to it that is usually beyond explanation. This kind of right is also incredibly subjective. For me, when I make something right, a collection of unrelated objects fit together in a way that looks as if it they were meant to fit together. If this then relates to beauty in a way that suits me, it becomes art. It becomes right.
Trying to describe this process in words is so difficult but putting this in words also helps me understand. There was a time when I would say that this is all just semantics and yet, when "right" happens in the process of creating, it is so gratifying.
This piece is call Last Stand.
