“I am not a business man, I am an artist”, said Warren Buffett and legions of journalists, bloggers, academics and business people joined in the chorus and repeated him happily. This is nonsense, of course, not everyone who calls himself an artist is one. At no time in history, building an empire made you an architect, nor did signing treaties (or checks) make you a painter or draftsman. Warren Buffett is as much an artist as the rest of us are billionaires, unless he shows us some of his artistic creations. Why does a man like Warren Buffett claim to be something he clearly is not, rather than what he really is — a business man and one of the most successful ones on the planet? We can only make an educated guess here, but it seems what he meant to say was that there is some special quality in how he does business, something comparable to art, something maybe better described as creativity. Continue reading...

What makes a genius a genius? Today, superlative attributes such as genius, artist, or master, are so generously used that it seems almost impossible to recognize true ingenuity. We know about creativity, about Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), and the Element (Ken Robinson). But, what does really happen when a masterpiece emerges, when something meaningful appears? In this 1969 Iowa Public Television broadcast we get a glimpse of that magical moment when Jim Henson explains about his puppets. It happens in plain sight: They come to life. Continue reading...

When pictures started moving and films came up in the 1880s it was only logical to incorporate text to substitute for spoken words — at least as long as films were silent. That kind of text was static and limited in the amount of words displayed. In order to display more text, frames had to be changed over time, or text had to be animated. The simplest form of animated text were rolling end titles. Only in the 1960s text started to be truly animated in film titles. Since then animated text has been widely used in film and television and became part of our visual culture. Continue reading...

About three years ago, in February 2006, Sir Ken Robinson mesmerized the audience at the TED conference with his presentation, Do schools kill creativity? This was a defining moment for TED, making Ken Robinson somewhat of a figurehead for TED Talks. In his latest book, The Element — How finding your passion changes everything, he gives another inspiring insight into the field of human creativity and its limitless opportunities. He urges us to search for our very own Element, the point where natural talent meets personal passion. Continue reading...