A Curious Madness —
You Need to be Sane to Create Madness.
yayoi kusama
It is the sanity of true genius that converts our terror into absolute delight. Sanity and madness as a tension of opposites has always seen madness more emotionally charged. Sanity, bores us by comparison, it seldom seems attractive. Madness, more than sanity, holds the repertoire in which to embed the story, an obsession, a feeling, even a passion. We are all born with varying amounts of sanity and madness inside us and it seems the madness in ourselves makes the sanity so necessary.
You need to be sane to create madness, Hamlet could never have written his own play and it is Shakespeare's sanity that makes Hamlet's madness so inventive. I'm not suggesting any of us are capable of murdering our mothers (I hope?). But most of us know which bit of that madness in us is hers. Madness requires genius to make it viable, a talent for transforming madness into something other than itself. It is the sanity of true genius that converts our terror into absolute delight.
David Bowie
Karl Largerfeld
No one is famous for their sanity, but when we imagine the so-called mad they appear before us in lurid, fascinating and discomfiting images. They are the stuff of iconography, invented representations. The mad in the modern era, have written and been written about, have sung and been sung about. They are essential to western drama, they mobilise people: they’re the great motivators. The world is full of the sane products and services, where values are too vague and easy to ignore. It's too unthreatening, it lacks definition it's safe territory for the timid marketer merely producing iterations and never any category breakthroughs.
Sane marketers never intimidate us, or take us to any edge and drop us into the unknown. Sanity looks distinctly un-prosperous in a culture committed to what it likes to think of as individuality, flair, creativity and enterprise.