This Day Last Year...

...I was in New York City.

 

In fact, it was my last day of a few weeks spent exploring the Big Apple. According to my blog post, I spent the day wandering Central Park, visiting the Guggenheim and musing over Anish Kapoor's Memory, eating club sandwiches at the Lexington Candy Shop on the Upper East Side, going to MoMA and visiting Robert Indiana's LOVE sculpture.

Funnily enough, I left out a few key details. Looking back, what I remember most is the heated discussion I was involved in for most of the day. I can't remember exactly what it was about or how it started, but it was something to do with the difference between ideas and executions.

"In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."
— Sol LeWitt Fountain, Marcel Duchamp, 1917 I distinctly remember arguing in the shadow of the Guggenheim that ideas are more important than the execution, because you can have an almost infinite number of executions for any one great idea.  But now I'm not so sure. As an ideas enthusiast who considers ideas to be her business, I'm surprised (and a little bit excited) that all this university palaver has me thinking that maybe the execution is actually pretty important.  “An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.” — Hindu Siddharta, Founder of Buddhism (563-483 B.C) Good ones, wild ones, shit ones, too-big ones, lost ones, borderline ridiculous ones, throw-them-in-the-bottom-draw-for-later ones - I've never been short of ideas. Unfortunately for me I tend to fall in-and-out of love with my ideas far too quickly, which means I'm either too close to my ideas or they get tossed in the bottom draw with photos of my ex - never to see the light of day again.  For years I've lived by the theory that, so long as I could set the wheels in motion to make the idea happen, someone else (who was obviously much more talented than myself at their chosen specialty) would make my ideas look good and function properly.  Over the past little while at uni I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to have to be more involved in the conversion of my ideas. That is to say that I used to like to think I was a 'hands-on' creative - but now I really need to be hands-on (even if only out of necessity).  Albeit a little a early and completely against my ethos, I've already chosen (or rather, it's chosen me) my New Year's resolution... I'm going to make my ideas happen more often in 2011.