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The Secret To Creativity, According To An Accomplished Artist

          

When we think of artists, we usually think of them as solitary creative geniuses, painting alone in a studio. Quartz design reporter Anne Quito has spoken to Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson and found that this is not always the case. 

For Eliasson, the recipe to creativity is collaboration.

It is a daily practice for his studio, where there are about 75 craftsmen, programmers, architects, archivists, art historians and chefs. The artist is known for his routine collaborations, including his most recent one for his crowd-funded design project ‘Little Sun’, which aims to provide solar-powered light to families without electricity.

“Sharing everything from concept to credit”

 You may be working with a small or  a huge team,but however a work of art should make people into “co-producers and not consumers.What makes art creative is really the way it touches the world, and this lies in the connections between collaborators, not the disconnectedness of working alone in a studio or office. 

We may work in teams where we make  sketches,  models, and decisions after that. But the  creative potential of what we do in the workstation is not in the doing but the way it affects everything else.
My point is that sometimes, people think that when you’re working on your pieces, you’re disconnected from the world. In a way you are, but the success lies in the connectivity.
Always feel that when I’m in the studio or workplace, you can talk to the world.
 

 

 

If a work of art trusts [its audience], it makes people into co-producers and not consumers. It’s about confidence in people and letting them co-produce culture. I’m excited when I’m not the only one involved because the success is bigger.

 

You need something unpredictable and emotional.

 

 

We live in a regime of social media where there is a democratization of knowledge, but on the other side there is a lack of emphatic communication. There’s a numbness. People are becoming numb to beautiful ideas like crowd funding, which is fundamentally beautiful.

To Eliasson in many of hispublic presentations, he appears introspective and serious but in Little Sun’s Kickstarter video, there’s a funny parrot on his shoulder.

Whenever people are bored with what he says, they can always look at the parrot instead of closing [the browser]. We actually have a very high percentage of people seeing things till the end. It’s humorous, but he's very interested in attention span. Art is usually very slow.

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Eliasson _ "I do think about that and I think art is more robust. And I think art needs to be challenged. It can be a very luxurious bubble, especially the art world and the art market. It’s important to break out of it, and time will say whether that was right or wrong."

It's incredibly important to question the condition in which we are working. I love the art world and I will continue to make art as well, but I do think thatproduct design and other artistic experiments are also a work of art. The success lies in the purposefulness of this.