A Question Of Style
Creative- always sums up to me a group of people who used to saunter around our corporate offices some thirty years ago, looking impossibly trendy and in their eyes chic, the way that some of them dressed I have a sneaking suspicion that they now dare not look at photographs of themselves, and their albums from the late sixties and early seventies are well hidden from the children and grandchildren.
Did you really go out of the front door wearing huge sidburns, stacked shoes and Oxford bags grandpa ?
They could excuse any sort of offensive behaviour because they were ‘creative’ darhlink !
However the bit that always made me laugh was that they had not got a scrap of originality amongst them. They did not create as they thought, they followed.
I am a fan of ‘Mad Men’ because of the storyline, effortless style and the total un pc of the whole thing. Never mind secondary smoking, these guys were into third and fourth smoking with added alcohol at work.
The opening sequence is of a ‘shadow’ in flat form, primary colours, falling from a building. Very evocative of the period. A few weeks later I started watching ‘Any Human Heart’, and guess what exactly the same type of shadow figure in the opening sequence. Then like a rash I have seen at least four advertisments in national magazines and newspapers following the same ‘style’.
There is precious little in the way of ‘creative’ here it is just following the herd.
If you want to see this close up, go to any gallery viewing, for a barbarian, I still get a few invitations. The art set will wax lyrical over a blob of tomato ketchup on a piece of canvas, saying it ‘centres the human existance in a parallel yet post modernist idiom that reminds one of Huxley or Noddy Holder’. Then there is a flutter from the gathered ensemble as they all agree using buzzwords they had read in the weekend Observer art colum.
The human condition is to follow, that is safe, that is normal, that is groupthink, that is where the latest wheeze is coming from from the political elite. Nudge politics, create a situation where people perceive the most ghastly rot trotted out as a passage from Revelations and fortelling the second coming. (viz Obama)
When you have three thousand people dressed vaguely the same, thinking the same, I defy anybody to say that any of these could be defined as creative.
As to style, what is the defining style of our age that people will look back and say that was an age of great style and originality of thought.
Jeans and a baggy fleece topped off with a baseball hat ?
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December 9, 2010 at 15:33 -
yes – and the YouTube video fo the dancing man sums it up quite well
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December 9, 2010 at 20:15 -
“YouTube video fo the dancing man” ?
You got me. I type in “the dancing man” and got 551,000 hits. -
December 9, 2010 at 22:43 -
When your walking in crowd the easiest thing to do is to walk in the same direction.
Try turning round and walking the other way. -
December 9, 2010 at 23:03 -
Oxford bags? That was in the twenties, surely. Long way away from the huge sideburns and stacked shoes.
But you’re right — I dursn’t look at the snaps of me dating back to the seventies. Too weird.
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