Once again, I have a case of writer’s block. Last year when I decided to give up my songwriting and drawing goals after a couple months, it was because I wasn’t good at making myself create on cue. Clearly it’s no different for writing, though perhaps a bit easier for me to fake.

So there’s the question of the day: is it okay to fake art? To force it just to keep the creative momentum flowing? I don’t know the answer to that.

Seth Godin said this just today:

You could watch the most non-creative, linear-thinking, do-it-by-the-book cop work to solve a crime and you’d be amazed at how creative her solutions seem to be. Creative for you, because you’ve never been in that territory before, it’s all new, it’s all at the edges. Boring for her, because it’s the same thing she does every time. It’s not creative at all.

This makes me wonder if, in some sense, creativity is simply knowing your environment so well that you can flex and move within your personal limitations and that, for you, it doesn’t seem like creativity. It just looks like it to everyone else because you know your space better than they do.

So is creativity relative? Does it even exist? It seems like more of a product of practice than anything. Someone should write a book about that. Oh wait.

The other day a friend asked my advice about an interesting predicament of hers. She’s in art school studying photography and does occasional wedding photography while she’s in school to earn some extra cash. The predicament arose when a client asked if she could mimic the style of a better-known photographer in the area.

My first reaction was that this was out of line on the client’s part to ask. Wedding photographers get hired based on their portfolio, so clients need to choose accordingly. To ask someone to use someone else’s voice is not only asking for a product they don’t sell, but it could very well ruin the end product by forcing the artist out of her natural flow, creating something sub-par.

My second reaction was for her sake: She would have to “practice” this other photographer’s style for the next few months before the wedding. As an art student, does she want to spend the coming months copying another artist’s voice when she should be focused on discovering her own? She’s aiming to be an artistic photographer, not a wedding shooter, so that seems like a bad idea.

Moral of the story: don’t force art. I keep saying this, but art in its truest form is creating that which the artist must by their nature. Not what someone else’s nature. Certainly there’s some control a paying client can ask for, but they need to know where the line is drawn.