Abstract
When considering the relationship between personality and a given occupation or vocation, we usually assume the relationship remains invariant over time. One might assume, for instance, that the temperament and traits that distinguished military leaders in the 5th century BCE would be the same traits as those belonging to warriors in the Middle Ages, or in our own times. Yet the changes throughout history in the social and economic status of soldiers, and in the technology of warfare, suggest that the personalities of men (or women) attracted to a military career will be quite different in each period.
Why do people think artists are special? It’s just another job.
—Andy Wathol (1975, p. 178)
Reproduced with permission of Copyright © 2004 by the American Psychological Association.
C. Hoare (Ed.) Handbook of Adult Development and Learning. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, 31–42.
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Notes
- 1.
For practical reasons, we limit out discussion of the domain of art to Western painting.
- 2.
Clearly, the two dimensions of the classification system are not completely independent. The more “painterly” a style is, for example, the less “representational” it is likely to be.
- 3.
In the study, Ludwig also classified the works of certain artists as “symbolic”. Because we do not use this classification category in the present chapter, Ludwig’s findings relating to symbolic styles are not discussed here.
- 4.
Also referred to, less favorably, as the “post-Warholian nightmare”.
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Abuhamdeh, S., Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014). The Artistic Personality: A Systems Perspective. In: The Systems Model of Creativity. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9085-7_14
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