Today's moment of intense realization courtesy Iris Murdoch

Perceptions.
It's not surprising that the act of creating something novel so often ends in failure.
It all comes back to the idea of perception. We are a concept driven race. Images exist in our head of what makes good art, but those images are informed by prior experience.
Simply speaking, we visualize before we see. And if the sensual experience of seeing an object falls in breech of our preconceived notion of what should make an object, we're likely to throw it out.

Fortunately, the greatest among us aren't subject to such bounds. The geniuses of art and music are iconoclasts who aggressively question their perceptions. And by questioning what the world tells them something should be, they're able to tap into something greater -- what the world could be. And maybe that's the true root of artistic genius. The ability to question.

Iris Murdoch puts it best when she writes that good art

often seems to us mysterious because it resists the easy patterns of the fantasy, whereas there is nothing mysterious about the forms of bad art since they are recognizable and familiar rat-runs of selfish day-dream. Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision.

Today's moment of INTENSE realization spurred on by Matthew Crawford's wonderful Shop Class as Soulcraft. Check it out. Really. Do it now.