“A picture lives only through the man who is looking at it." —Pablo Picasso (1935)

I had an epiphany today. I was reading this passage in Bill Bryons latest book and suddenly everything made sense;

“When you eat a brownie, all that’s really going in your mouth is texture and chemicals. It’s your brain that reads these scentless, flavorless molecules and vivifies them for your pleasure. Your brownie is sheet music. Your brain makes it a symphony.”

As artists were only seeking to write “sheet music” that’s played by the instrument of another human mind. Like the art critic Jean Dolent said - “Gauguin’s crucible is the brain.”

Creativity, broadly defined, involves the viewers’ ability to experience our creations. The “symphony” so to speak, is all happening in the mind of the viewer. So the ultimate goal is create a stimulus, auditory or visual or any other kind, that induces in the mind of the viewer a state change that mirrors that of the artist. A packet of visual or auditory information that is strikes the meat computer of another mammal like a tuning fork, causing it to vibrate at the same frequency you were when you made the thing. That’s a rough metaphor but it hints at something strange and actually true as far as I can discern