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I stumbled upon a video over at fora.tv where Adam Savage discusses his obsessions:

For me, this really is an inspiring presentation, as I’ve been starting to realize that obsession is exactly what is lacking from the current state of so many forms of expression.  Obsession is, for me at least, what sets apart good modern art from mediocre modern art. It’s what separates good design from bad design. It’s what separates the intriguing from the commonplace.

The St. Louis Art Museum currently has an installation upstairs in their modern art collection.  It’s a large ring of rocks on the floor, maybe twelve feet wide.  And it’s completely uninteresting.  A twelve-foot ring of old shoes.. or cellphones.. or, hell, lima beans would have been more interesting.  In contrast, the next room over has a painting by Chuck Close hanging on the wall:

At just over 9 feet tall, it’s striking to say the least.  A hand-painted, photo-realistic portrait with the ears painted in slightly soft-focus and the pores of the nose the size of a thumb-print.  The rock sculpture could be replicated by any bored fifth-grader, while only a maniac could come close to reproducing the Keith portrait. And the difference appears to be obsession.

Just skim the Wikipedia article on Close. The guy suffered a spinal artery collapse that left him mostly paralyzed, and he still continued to paint by strapping a paintbrush to his wrist. Now that’s obsession.

A near-universal lack of obsession is evidenced everywhere in modern culture.  Look at the contemporary t-shirt designs from Affliction and Express.  Ridiculously popular, they consist of simple vector tracings of old engravings mixed with formulaic typography.  A talented graphic designer could churn out several of these in a day. So what’s the problem with that? Well, they’re just not very interesting. The designs lack craftsmanship. In an effort to cover up the lack of real effort, they rely on copy & pasting meticulously hand-drawn engravings from almost a century ago. I’m guilty of this myself actually — the background image of this site is just a quick Photoshop from one of those ye olde scans, but that just illustrates my point. I designed logo and background of the site in an hour or so, and I relied on the image of the engraving to do all the texture work for me. And that’s exactly why it feels like a run-of-the-mill design to me.

In general, I think if we could find ways to turn a little self-motivation into obsession, the world would be a much more interesting and inspiring place.