20 Must-See TED Talks For Aspiring Artists

Videos of ideas worth sharing.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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If you are an aspiring artist, designer, or any other type of creative person you'll enjoy these 20 Must-See TED Talks For Aspiring Artists. The speakers all explore their experiences and influences, touching on what helped them accomplish great things. Needless to say, it is all motivational stuff.

So motivational, in fact, that it doesn't matter what you aspirations are: These talks will inspire you to move further towards your goals.

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Jason Fried

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James Fried: Why Work Doesn't Happen At Work

"[Facebook and Twitter] aren’t the real problems in the office. The real problems are what I like to call the M&Ms, the Managers and the Meetings."

Date: October 2010

Jason Fried supports those of us who don't enjoy workdays at the office. He explains his theory on why work doesn't happen at work, attributing the blame to what he calls the M&Ms, while proposing three solutions to the problem. Fried believes in effective collaboration as the nature of producitve work.

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ESPO

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Stephen Powers: Urban Love Letters

"When all of my classmates were getting ready for the SATs and what not, I got into graffiti. It satisfied my every need that I needed for color, design, adventure, line, design, color, adventure—it was all there for me. And the arts program I was admired into at the time had none of that. So I went on these rooftops and painted these rooftops."

Date: February 14, 2011

Stephen Powers, also known as ESPO, is a graffiti artist turned studio artist turned graffiti artist. A Philadelphia native, Powers moved to New York then back home in 2009 and painted "A Love Letter for You," a series of 50 murals in West Philadelphia. The artist also describes a similar community project that was based in Brazil.

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Charlie Todd

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Charlie Todd: The Shared Experience of Absurdity

"There is no point and that there doesn’t have to be a point. We don’t need a reason. As long as it’s fun."

Date: May 2011

Charlie Todd, the creator of Improv Everywhere, produces absurd and hilarious situations. Todd originally want to become an actor and decided that the public sphere could be his stage. His talk describes how Improv Everywhere projects bring people together by creating moments of shared experiences.

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Susan Cain

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Susan Cain: The Power of Introverts

"There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas."

Date: February 2012

Susan Cain reveals the positive side to being an introvert. Yup, it can be a good thing. Although she herself has experienced situations in which she was encouraged to be outgoing and social, she realized that being quiet is not such a bad thing. In "The Power of Introverts" Cain shows her support for those of us that are a like her.

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Ben Cameron

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Ben Cameron: The True Power of the Performing Arts

"The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity."

Date: February 2010

Ben Cameron discusses live arts—music and dance—within the context of the always live Internet. His talk is a fresh, progressive take on performing arts.

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Joshua Prince-Ramus

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Joshua Prince-Ramus: Building a Theater That Remakes Itself

"It’s time for architecture to do things again, not just represent things."

Date: October 2009

Joshua Prince-Ramus, well-known as the architect of the Seattle Central Library, believes that architecture should be given a more active role, and that architects should rethink their design process to create more multifaceted spaces. He introduces us to the process he took in creating the theater machine that is the Wyly Theater, which has the ability to move between multiple configurations at the push of a button.

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Milton Glaser

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Milton Glaser: How Great Design Makes Ideas New

"Fear of embarrassment drives me as much as any ambition."

Date: February 1998

Milton Glaser—famous for the famous I [heart] NY logo—uses his talk to chat about a new work inspired by the painter Piero della Francesca. It is a jumping off point for a a discussion of what it takes to create a good poster and how an old idea can be made new through design. 

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Natasha Tsakos

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Natasha Tsakos' Multimedia Theatrical Adventure

"As a street performer, I learned that everybody wants to connect. And that if you’re a bit extraordinary, if you’re not exactly of human appearance, then people will feel inclined to participate and to feel out loud."

Date: February 2009

Natasha Tsakos is a performer, producer, and president and founder of theater company Zero llc. She presents part of her performance "Upwake," in which the character Zero goes between dreaming and reality in a virtual world. She takes theater to the next level, incorporating and synchronizing 3D animation, electric sounds, and movement to create a new space for performance and expression.

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Olafur Eliasson

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Olafur Eliasson: Playing With Space and Light

"Is there a sense of consequence? If I have a sense of the space, if I feel that the space is tangible, if I feel there is time, if there is a dimension I can call time, I also feel I can change the space."

Date: February 2009

In his talk, designer Olafur Eliasson recognizes the subjective nature of perception and discusses how we can all influence what others see. Eliasson works with space, distance, color and light to express the space that we are and occupy, and has executed large-scale projects such as "Waterfalls" in New York harbor. His works allow for direct viewer experience with his ideas, as he wishes to somewhat blur the distinct line between author and audience.

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J.R.

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J.R.'s TED Prize Wish: Use Art to Turn the World Inside Out

"The city’s the best gallery I could imagine. I would never have to make a book and then present it to a gallery and let them decide if my work was nice enough to show it to people. I would control it directly with the public in the streets."

Date: March 2011

In 2011, French street artist J.R. made a TED Prize wish to use art to give voice to underserved populations. His Inside Out Project is a collective effort that asks people around the world to share their unique story by submitting black and white portraits, which the artist transforms into posters.

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C.K. Williams

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C.K. Williams: Poetry For All Seasons of Life

"But oh, her soap! Might its bitter burning / have been what made me a poet?"

Date: February 2001

C.K. Williams reads his poems that relate to the subject of youth and age. The stories of his works span from childhood episodes to college sweethearts, as he presents various challenges and lessons learned in life. Williams is known as a social poet who is amused by modern civilization's way of interaction and living.

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J.J. Abrams

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J.J. Abrams: The Mystery Box

"In whatever it is that I do, I find myself drawn to infinite possibility, that sense of potential."

Date: March 2007

J.J. Abrams is the producer of Cloverfield and Lost. In his talk, he discusses his appreciation for mystery, boxes, and wanting to know how things work. He traces back his inspiration to his grandfather, who always encouraged him to make things and bought him a Super 8 camera when he was just 10.

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Isaac Mizrahi

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Isaac Mizrahi: Fashion, Passion, and About a Million Other

"There are so many images out there, so many clothes out there, and the only ones that look interesting to me are the ones that look slightly mistaken."

Date: February 2008

Isaac Mizrahi mixes high fashion and the mass market, gaining inspiration from every happenstance moment instead of formalized research. Mizrahi appreciates mistakes as the beginning point of creation, and admits to following people on the streets just to observe their style.

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Maira Kalman

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Maira Kalman: The Illustrated Woman

"How do we actually know that these sentences coming out of our mouths are real stories, are real sentences?"

Date: March 2007

 Always wanting to tell a story, Kalman went from writing what she calls bad poetry to focusing on illustration. Her drawings have often been featured on covers for The New Yorker and children's books. She has also published books of her own.

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David Carson

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David Carson: Design, Discovery and Humor

"You have to utilize who you are in your work. Nobody else can do that: nobody else can pull from your background, from your parents, your upbringing, your whole life experience."

Date: February 2003

Sociologist David Carson likes to surf, and he can also design. Reflecting his interest in typography, his magazine Ray Gun explores the use of text throughout a page. For TED, Carson presents slides of his own work and found images to discuss how design leads to discovery.

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Lawrence Lessig

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Lawrence Lessig: Re-examining the Remix

"All of the great Disney works took works that were in the public domain and remixed them."

Date: April 2010

Larry Lessig is a former "young Republican," present Harvard professor, and a leading figure in copyright issues. Here, Lessig discusses remix culture and promoting marketplace competition through maintaining creative freedom.

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Aaron Koblin

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Aaron Koblin: Artfully Visualizing Our Humanity

"An interface can be a powerful narrative device. And as we collect more and more personally and socially relevant data, we have an opportunity, and maybe even an obligation, to maintain [our] humanity and tell some amazing stories."

Date: March 2011

Aaron Koblin presents how technology brings us closer to our own humanity. Koblin gathers data through digital platforms and conjures up visual works that show the developing cultural interaction between humans (and between humans and computers, and phones, etc.).

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Swoon

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Callie Curry: aka Swoon

"I was a young woman, and I really had no sense of my ability to make any kind of change in the world. And then suddenly in this very concrete way, I went outside, I put up a wheatpaste, I walked by the next day, and there it was. I had changed that street corner."

Date: December 24, 2010

Swoon is a Brooklyn-based street artist who is known for her large scale wheatpaste prints. Her talk focuses on promoting social change and the belief that art has provocative and transformative qualities. Although she started off by illegally displaying street art, today her work has been collected by major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Tate Modern.

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Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky: How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World

"It's those two things together—ancient human motivation, and the modern tools to allow that motivation to be joined in large scale efforts—that are the new design resources."

Date: June 29, 2010

Clay Shirky explains the merits of having a cognitive surplus circulating through media today, something some fear will be a distraction in living. Shirky believes that an over abundance of information allows for beneficial social and political interactions to occur. Her discussion makes sense of how to utilize and employ media creatively..

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Elizabeth Gilbert

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Elizabeth Gilbert: Your Elusive Creative Genius

"Maybe [artistry] doesn’t have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you’re finished…it starts to change everything."

Date: February 9, 2009

Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of Eat, Pray, Love, and sees a creative genius in all of us. In this TED Talk, she proposes a new idea of genius that does not single out a few individuals as geniuses, but recognizes the genius within each person.

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