Art Life & Lives Rick Rubin-The Creative Act: A Way of Being

Rick Rubin's book "The Creative Act: A way of Being" is the subject of this installment of Art Life & Lives (Still open to a better name.) 

Rick Rubin is a legendary record producer who started his his career producing hip hop records out of his dorm room at NYU. in the early 80s. Over the decades he’s put out some of the most iconic albums from a wide variety of artists including the Beastie Boys, Jay z, Slayer, Adele, System of a Down, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Justin Timberlake, Metallica, Public Enemy, Weezer, and many more.

This year he released a book called the Creative Act. Which is a kind of meditation on creativity. It offers useful ways to think about creating art.

The Biography section in my video comes from interviews Rubin has done. This book is not a biography. It’s not a memoir of his career or anything. There’s not even really anything that’s specific to music. It really is a meditation of creativity.

After I finished this video I came across some other examples that illustrate a few of the ideas covered in the book.

Orson Welles on ignorance

Someone sent me this clip of Orson Welles talking about directing Citizen Cane on the Dick Cavett Show. This clip ties in with Rubin's line that "innocence sparks innovation." Dick Cavett asks Orson Welles about the innovative filmmaking techniques he employed while making Citizen Cane.

Cavett asks "...When you were out there (shooting Citizen Cane) and they said 'you can't do these things, you can't shoot a scene that way...' and you knew that you could. And how did you know?"

Welles Responds "Because I didn't know any better... It comes from just sheer dumbness. It's ignorance, there's no authority in the world like it."

He goes on to talk about his camera person Greg Toland. Toland wanted to work on Citizen Cane and when Welles asked him why, Toland responded, "because you've never made a picture. And you don't know what cannot be done."

David Lynch being conventional

Rubin talks about Rules and conventions being a hindrance to creativity but also how they can help you. I was reminded of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. He had made Dune which was by most accounts, a huge failure. For his next film he took the structure and conventions of A film noir detective movie and hung all of his absurdist surrealism and atmosphere onto the scaffolding of that genre. And it’s one of his best films.

Rubin has a podcast called Broken Record. 

Here are some of my favorite episodes:

• Andre 3000 
• Serj Tankian (System of a Down) 
• The first episode with Malcom Gladwell interviewing Rick  

Also Check out:

• Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch 
• The Artist's way by Julia Cameron 
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield 
• The Art Spirit by Robert Henri 

“The object isn’t to make art, its to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable” -Robert Henri