Creativity Quote by Henry Flynt

There is a sly bait-and-switch in Flynt's sentence: what sounds like a career milestone in the New York art world turns into a conversion narrative. He starts with competition - the classic downtown pressure cooker where status is earned by novelty, speed, and a kind of performative disdain for tradition. Then he pivots to “discovered classical North Indian music,” as if the most radical move available in that scene wasn’t another new technique, but an older, more demanding system of listening.

The intent reads less like tourism than escape velocity. “Competing” suggests a market logic even in supposedly anti-market circles: artists jousting for attention, grants, and the right set of friends. Flynt’s discovery functions as a critique of that ecology. North Indian classical music, with its long arcs, disciplined apprenticeship, and reverence for nuance, offers a counter-economy: value accrues through depth, not churn.

Subtext: modernism’s hunger for the “elsewhere,” but with a twist. In mid-century New York, non-Western forms were often mined as exotic raw material. Flynt frames it as discovery rather than appropriation, yet the phrasing still carries the era’s asymmetry - he finds a tradition while trying to beat peers at being original. That tension is the point. The quote captures a familiar avant-garde paradox: the pursuit of the new can lead straight into the old, not as nostalgia, but as a weapon against the thinness of art-world rivalry.