Concept

Creativity as Noticing

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Creativity as Noticing

Rick Rubin‘s account of what a creator actually does: not make the thing, but notice it. Asked by Tyler Cowen whether Sherlock Holmes’s deductions are acts of creativity or acts of noticing, Rubin refused the distinction — ‘I think they’re the same thing. I think creativity is acts of noticing. Nothing comes from us. The creator isn’t making the thing. The creator is recognizing the thing, noticing the thing, and then sharing it in a way where the audience can hopefully get a glimpse of what we’ve noticed.’

The claim is easy to mistake for a mystical remark about inspiration. It is not. Rubin offers it as a working description of a job he has done for forty years, and it produces specific, unusual operating rules — about what a producer contributes, how much of it to impose, and where to look for people who can still see.

The concept is best fixed by what it denies. It denies that creation is generation, and that the creator is the source. What the creator supplies is attention and a way of sharing what that attention found.

The mechanism: attention, then transmission

Two moves, in order. First notice something already present; then find a form in which an audience can glimpse it. Neither is invention.

The discipline is therefore trainable, because attention is. Rubin’s method for listening to people is procedural rather than mysterious: stop formulating your reply or hunting for the point of disagreement while the other person is still speaking, and ask questions only to understand — ‘why is that the case? How did you get to that?’ — never to challenge. He treats musical listening as the same skill pointed at a different object, and credits nearly everything he knows to it: ‘whatever I know is from talking to people… we get information from outside of ourselves.‘

What it implies for the producer’s role

Taste, not technique. Rubin plays no instrument to speak of and holds that this neither helps nor hurts: ‘My involvement is purely about taste. It’s not about technical skill.’ If creation is noticing, an inability to execute is not a gap — the work is the noticing.

Minimal fingerprints. His stated ideal is ‘having the biggest impact on the work with the least amount of fingerprints. I want the work to be wholly the artist’s work. The less I can do, the better, provided it’s the best work the artists have ever done in their lives.’ Pushed on it, he means it literally: the limit case would be never meeting the artist at all.

Point, don’t command. Reviewing a body of work he might make 100 notes, privately knowing perhaps five will make or break it — and he shares all 100 and leaves the choice to the artist. Noticing confers no authority to decide; it only obliges you to say what you saw.

The corollary: outsiders notice what insiders have stopped seeing

If the scarce input is attention rather than skill, then expertise is a liability as often as an asset, because fluency stops you noticing. Rubin’s recurring production principle follows: bring in someone who does not belong to the genre.

His clearest case is not stylistic but technical. On Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush, Young put the guitarist Nils Lofgren — ‘an unbelievable guitar player’ — on piano specifically because he doesn’t really play piano. Someone who feels the music without knowing an instrument’s conventions finds what a trained player would not. Rubin generalises: ‘having someone who’s good at one thing playing something else is a good idea.‘

Contrast with neighbours

Against Creativity Faucet. Julian Shapiro’s framework is the sharpest foil, because the two agree on the destination and invert the route. The Faucet says creativity is a backed-up pipe: generate past the point where output feels bad, and the volume of production trains recognition. Rubin runs it the other way — recognition is primary, and production is the act of sharing what recognition found. Shapiro would have you make a great deal in order to see better; Rubin would have you see, and make as little as possible. The two are not incompatible in practice, but they point a practitioner at different work on a Monday morning.

Against Product Taste. The vault’s other taste concept is judgement exercised among options — selecting, directing, telling good from bad in product work. Rubin’s noticing sits upstream of that: it is what puts the option in front of you at all. The same word does related but distinct work.

Where mainstream views differ

The romantic account of the artist — the one Rubin is denying — treats the creator as a source, and treats originality as the mark of value. On that view ‘nothing comes from us’ either drains creative work of its achievement or is false modesty from a man with an unusual track record.

There is also a selection problem the concept does not answer. Rubin’s own judgement about whom to work with is, by his account, unarguable: ‘it’s like falling in love. I can’t say why… it’s a feeling, and you feel it, and you want to hear more.’ If creativity is noticing, and the noticing cannot be explained or taught at the level that matters most — which artist, which five notes of the hundred — then the theory explains the work while leaving the scarce ingredient exactly where it started.

In the wiki