What can Greek wine, Twitter, and DJ Kool Herc teach us about creativity?
When we picture the artist in his natural habitat, we might be tempted to impose our own ideals of artistic purity. The stereotypes are familiar: the master artist beginning after the perfect “eureka” moment, brought to them by a “holy" muse, while making sure to avoid the “taint" of any vulgar commercial motives.
Instinctively, the purest art should require the purest creative environment. So it comes as a satisfying surprise that art’s real origins are actually quite banal.
In Matthew Battles' new book “Palimpsest", the author/journalist/Harvard research director describes the origin and spread of writing—both as commodity and art form—starting in Ancient Greece.
He explains how the first “writers” didn’t emerge from poetry workshops or intellectual salons, but in the bustle of the marketplace:
In ancient Greece, writing arose among traders and artisans doing business in the markets with foreigners and visitors from other cities. Their alphabet emerged not in scribal colleges or the king’s halls, nor was it brought by conquerors, but instead came ashore in the freewheeling, acquisitive, materialistic atmosphere of the agora, the Greek marketplace that also birthed democracy and the public sphere.
There was hardly anything “artistic” about early Greek writing. Ancient Greek culture followed a mostly oral tradition: Homer was an oral poet who relied on mnemonic devices to ensure his content could be repeated accurately. Socrates (none of whose writings survive) lived on in the lectures transcribed by his student, Plato. Poets and philosophers and playwrights would eventually rely on the written word to ensure their place in the canon, but it took them a while to start.
In fact, the first people to write down their thoughts were neither poets nor philosophers nor playwrights.
They wrote promotional material for wine jugs:
The first alphabetic inscriptions in Greek appear on goods—keepsake vases, containers for oil and olives. The likely earliest such inscription extant, the “Dipylon inscription,” is on a wine jug; it reads something like this: “Whichever dancer dances most fleetly, he shall get me [this vessel]”—a trophy cup. The so-called Cup of Nestor, a clay vessel dating from the eighth century BC, bears an inscription that begins “Nestor’s cup am I, good to drink from.”
The first instance of writing for commercial purposes by no means coincides with the emergence artistic writing. In fact, it took quite a while for artists to catch on...
For the next couple of centuries, Greek letters are used mostly to inscribe dedications—indexing acquisition and ownership in a society where property was the basis of participation in the lettered public sphere.
Even after writing had emerged as a platform to communicate thoughts and ideas, it took hundreds of years for the practice to be adopted by scholars and artists. Far from being an idiosyncrasy specific to Ancient Greek, we find that artists are slow to the draw in many other mediums as well.
Art is constantly being created, but the form that it takes is highly dependent on the opportunities first made available by more practically-minded entrepreneurs.
Where would pop music be without the mechanics of distribution: first, with the phonograph (invented by Edison to play back telegraph messages), and later, radio (first used by the military) and the internet (also developed for the military)? Would Charles Dickens have existed without the monthly magazine—which gave him the opportunity to publish his novels part by part? Even the art of the concise wittiness (as embodied by Twitter) would be nowhere without the humble origins SMS, which started in an engineering lab for a telecommunications company.
Every platform used by artists is first used to serve a humbler, functional need. Consider the history of hip-hop music, an art form whose spread we can confidently trace. The genre—which hadn’t existed prior to the 1970s—is now the most popular form of music in the world. Its origins were similarly mundane.
One of the earliest rappers, Grandmaster Caz, was first exposed to rap at a block party hosted by DJ Kool Herc:
The microphone was just used for making announcements, like when the next party was gonna be, or people's moms would come to the party looking for them, and you have to announce it on the mic. Different DJs started embellishing what they were saying. I would make an announcement this way, and somebody would hear that and they add a little bit to it. I'd hear it again and take it a little step further 'til it turned from lines to sentences to paragraphs to verses to rhymes.
Rap emerged not as a way for artists to showcase their talents in lyricism, rhythm, or timbre, but as a way for party hosts to inform their patrons that their moms were looking for them—without damping the party atmosphere.
From the wine cellars of Ancient Greece to the block parties of Brooklyn, new artistic platforms are rarely dreamed up by the artists themselves. Rather, the artists take advantage of the merchant’s new medium—and colonize it.
So we probably shouldn’t worry that todays’ artists are being forced to create in a culture where text is limited to 140 characters, and where visual content is forced to fit inside a perfect square on a mobile app. Art finds a way to flourish in the frontier opened up by ambitious entrepreneurs—even if its beginnings are rather humble.
For the Greeks, it all started with a copywriter and a wine jug.
Our thoughts on art, business, productivity, and inspiration: here.
