The Crowd, the Critic, and the Muse: A Book for Creators (Unabridged)
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
"We are all creators. Whether or not we create is not up to us. We are human, and creating is what we do. Every interaction, movement, and decision is creativity at work. We are all artists. We all order creation around us into the world that we want to make."—Michael Gungor
In The Crowd, the Critic, and the Muse, Michael Gungor takes an uncompromising - and humorous - look at our creative selves and the world that we have fashioned around us.
Through story and reflection, Gungor shows how our deepest beliefs and assumptions about the universe affect how we order creation. Our art and our humanity are inextricably entwined.
Surveying pop songs and church services, fine art and movies, Gungor shows what these works of creation reveal about us - for better and worse - and offers a powerful argument for why we can do better.
Art is like fruit, and if we want to improve the quality of our creative output, we must tend not only to the fruit, but to the tree, its roots, and the soil that it is planted in. To become free as creators, we must not simply try harder, we must become different. Gungor argues that this kind of change demands both an awareness of one's own cultural conditioning and a healthy degree of faith, doubt, hope and love.
An award-winning, globetrotting musician, Gungor also reveals his personal journey as an artist and creator, a tale of moving from innocence to wisdom, from simplicity to complexity and back again, a tale of leaving home and returning in a new, better, and more creative way.
Customer Reviews
The most honest voice I've read/listened to in years, perhaps ever.
There's no way I can adequately describe what this book has meant to me, but here goes:
I'll start by saying that I've grown tired of the "self-help" book. Authors write like they've found the secret to happiness, and if you just follow their (often vague) advice, everything will be fixed and you'll never know sorrow again. I can feel their narcissism and the falsehood behind their words oozing out of the page. They just wanted to write the next best-seller and buy a yacht.
This book is not one of those books. Michael Gungor is not one of those authors.
He is just a seeker, having gone down many different paths, at times filled with hope and laid low with despair. He is readily willing to admit his own faults, putting them into perspective rather than hiding them from sight. As a human, faults and all, he only strives to put words and melodies to the infinite beauty that surrounds us in this universe, knowing full well that it's impossible, but it makes for beautiful prose anyway. After all, that's what art is, and he has dedicated his life to it.
If you are an artist struggling for real inspiration (or wrestling with how important your role is or isn't in society), this book will help. If you are a human being striving for meaning or direction, or at the very least a friend who knows well the pain of that longing, this book will help.
I needed it badly at this stage in my life, and I expect I'll return to it many times.
Thank you, Michael Gungor.
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