Artistry vs creativity for music producers

Hey there,

Here's a fun question for you: what's the difference between artistry and creativity?

Yikes. Big stuff for a Monday morning, I know.

People have been thinking about creativity and artistry for a long time (see: ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Sumerians for a start), and it doesn't really seem like anybody has settled on an answer for what either really is let alone the difference between the two. But what if it didn't have to be complicated? Or even mysterious?

The first piece of writing to explicitly discuss the topic of creativity - Socrates' Phaedrus - posits that creativity is "divine madness." You already know what I think of that. I think creativity, artistry, and their differences can be rationalized without diminishing the value of either.

Plus, y'all know that I love being actionable above all else. So let me share with you what I think each one is and the difference will become self-evident.

Creativity is output

In its most fundamental form, creativity is making. Every time you sit down at your DAW to sequence a pattern, record something, or mess around with effects you are exercising creativity. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that.

There's this weird notion that something can only be considered "creative" if it's incredibly novel, as if creativity is measured only by whether somebody has seen something before or not. This is incredibly untrue. It's the kind of idea drummed up by people who don't make things in an attempt to understand what the act of creation is. These notions circle back to makers like ourselves and it creates a strange form of self-limiting thought.

So let me clear it up for you, in case you need to hear it from somebody else: if you make music, you are creative. The act of doing is creativity.

Artistry is context

The question of what is artistry is maybe a little more nebulous but, again, I prefer a practical, actionable answer over a mystery that fucks with my (or your) head. I've spent a lot of time being and working with artists across disparate media. The experience that left the most lasting impact on my understanding of artistry was my grad assistantship working at my university's contemporary art gallery. We worked with internationally renowned artists like william cordova and Ebony G. Patterson and seeing their processes firsthand left me with a singular impression.

Artistry is just context. It's understanding what you are making and why you are making it. The best artists have context for their work. That context sometimes comes in the form of concept but it can also come in the form of just making an album or EP with a cohesive creative vision.

This framing of artistry can extend further into things such as branding or design as well. Your artistry is how you contextualize and present your creative output. This framing of artistry frees me up to worry less about creating "important art" and allows me to focus on what I'm trying to do and say with my music.

Content vs Context

Creativity is content and artistry is context. It is not magical and it doesn't have to be. The magic is in the experience not in the process. And, as you know by now, magic users are just damn good studies nothing more and nothing less.

Til next time,

ZW