Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 December 29, 2014<\/p>\n
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Our global economy increasingly relies upon change, innovation, and renewal. A disciplined imagination is required for innovation to support value creation in all sectors and industries. Creativity is the essential ingredient for workforce investment, economic development, and financial prosperity. Today the market value of products and services derives as much from uniqueness and aesthetic appeal as it does from function and performance. Excellent products inspire us with their artistry, design, or beauty.<\/p>\n
Creativity and talent provide a competitive advantage, reaching across businesses. Organizations seek employees who can creatively solve problems, communicate, and work in teams. Reflecting the state of the creative economy, David Pink declared in the Harvard Business Review<\/em> that the \u201cMFA is the new MBA.\u201d Pink meant that a graduate degree in art is highly compatible with doing business. For example, nonverbal forms of knowing exemplified by artists are increasingly important for a company\u2019s success. The arts are complimentary partners with many professions, creating conditions cognitive psychologists identify as ideal for learning.<\/p>\n Art plays an essential role in the holistic education of people as whole beings, capable of thinking with and through mind, heart, and hands. The variety of learning styles promoted by art and art making offer deep cognitive channels required for effectively ordering the self. By projecting ourselves in and through the arts, we fashion ourselves in salutary ways that align with the human spirit\u2019s longing for wholeness. How does this happen?<\/p>\n To study the arts is to learn to \u201cread\u201d images across a spectrum of intellectual, artistic, cultural, and environmental domains, perceiving life through all mediums in which meaning is expressed. Artists regard their craft as a form of knowledge expressed in a language of images. Musicians think in<\/em> music and not simply about music. Painters and sculptors think critically in color and forms, making choices, say, with pigment or stone. By thinking in the intersensory domain of images, we reconnect with our primal humanity and the basic impulses behind an aesthetic-artistic experience.<\/p>\n Innovators in all fields are \u201cartists\u201d not because they are prone to fantasies or states of disassociation, but because, like children, they harness playfulness to productive ends. Imaginative play is a capacity for shifting experience of reality. Walt Whitman wrote, There was a boy who went forth every day;\/And the first object he look\u2019d upon, that object he became;\/And that object became part of him \u2026\u201d <\/em>Imaginative play, like art, constitutes a poetic intelligence that is not a matter of right answers or the correct use of language; it probes the essence of things, moving awareness into different qualities of being. Poet Cid Corman highlighted this poetic power of artists and children when he wrote: Follow\/the stream:\/Don\u2019t go -\/ but be\/going<\/em>.<\/p>\n Masters of modern art – Klee, Kandinsky, Picasso, Miro – found inspiration in the art of children. They understood that they must return to their child-like mind, tapping the wellspring of creative consciousness to support their personal and professional well-being. \u201cAll children are artists; the trick is to reclaim this when we grow up,\u201d stated Picasso. Similarly, Baudelaire knew that \u201cGenius is childhood recovered at will.\u201d Children, artists, entrepreneurs, and designers share the principle of creative appropriation, freely using images for creative purposes of art, work, and life.<\/p>\n Poetic thinking in<\/em> images allows us to see life as simultaneously literal and imaginal, subject to interpretation and change. This \u201cseeing through\u201d the literal to the possible carries evolutionary power, an antidote to the crippling attitude of this is the way things are<\/em>. Realizing the danger posed by the illiteracy of radical literalism, Robert Frost asserted that unless we have a \u201cproper poetical education,\u201d we are \u201cnot safe anywhere.\u201d Poetic intelligence is vitality and is life.<\/p>\n My point is that the arts are not simply expressive; they develop the very tools of thinking. Image making is the mind\u2019s most fundamental activity of knowing. Learning results when our experiences provide, confirm, or modify images of the world and ourselves. As primary units of consciousness, images are not <\/strong>simply metaphors for ideas but relate to how we acquire, organize, and use information. This is as true for scientists as it is for artists.<\/p>\n Scientists, like artists, note the function of imagery in their work. A distinctive power of the poetic mind mentioned above is its ability to grasp the inner life identity of things and not simply to perceive similarities or outer relationships. Eugene Wigner, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics said, \u201cThe discovery of the laws of nature require, first and foremost, intuition, concerning pictures and a great many subconscious processes.\u201d Jerome Friedman, another Nobel Prize recipient in Physics asserted, \u201cReasoning is constructed with movable images, just as poetry is.\u201d Albert Einstein, who began playing violin at age six, said his discovery of the theory of relativity was the \u201cresult of musical perception.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to poetic thinking through images, prominent artists and scientists share other mental skills and operations: accurate observation, spatial thought, kinesthetic thought, identification of essential components of a complex whole, recognition and invention of patterns governing a system, empathy with objects of study, and visual, verbal, or mathematical synthesis and communication of results. When mathematical capacities of mind fuse with aesthetic perception through artistic experience, we undergo holistic transformations that generate inspiring images of animated, embodied thought and a fuller humanity.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 December 29, 2014 Our global economy increasingly relies upon change, innovation, and renewal. A disciplined imagination is required for innovation to support value creation in all sectors and industries. Creativity is the essential ingredient for workforce investment, economic development, and financial prosperity. Today the market value of products and services … Continue reading POETIC INTELLIGENCE IN ART, SCIENCE & THE CREATIVE ECONOMY<\/span>