Isn’t it time for another Malcolm Gladwell post? A few weeks ago Tina Roth Eisenberg at my favorite design blog, Swissmiss, linked to this swell video of Gladwell discussing Fleetwood Mac and David Galenson’s ideas about creativity at AIGA’s GAIN Conference in October, the same month that the The New Yorker ran Gladwell’s article about him.

Galenson is an economist who developed a theory of creativity that states that artistic innovators mostly come in two packages, of which the exemplars are Picasso and Cézanne. Picasso made his mark as a young man, and his pictorial brilliance seemed to come quite naturally; Cézanne’s success came much later in life, and his breakthroughs seemed the result of a great deal of sustained effort and slow experimentation. As far as I can tell, neither Galenson nor Fleetwood Mac is mentioned in Outliers, at least according to a search on Amazon’s OnlineReader (I have not obtained my own copy of the book yet), this even though the subject seems to fit in perfectly well with the book’s themes.

Then you have the interesting fact that, as Jason Kottke pointed out several months ago, this Galenson article was, according to The New York Times, actually rejected by The New Yorker in 2006, the first Gladwell pitch to receive the heave-ho. David Leonhardt’s article quotes Gladwell’s “editor” pooh-poohing Galenson’s spiel and asking Gladwell whether he is “crazy.” (What editor could this be? Surely not David Remnick?)

Galenson’s division of artists into blazing young “conceptual innovators” and older “experimental innovators” reminds me a bit of The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin’s famous appropriation of the ancient Greek poet Archilochus (admit it, you knew that this blog would eventually work Archilochus in somehow). Archilochus wrote that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”; Berlin’s idea was that Dostoevsky was a hedgehog and Tolstoy a fox who wished that he were a hedgehog. Somehow the conceptual innovators seem like hedgehogs to me, and experimental innovators like foxes. Galenson, by the way, does cite the hedgehog/fox pairing in his book Old Masters and Young Geniuses.

There aren’t that many bands whose career arc is that similar to Fleetwood Mac, in my opinion (rock is a young person’s game), but it happens that my favorite band in the world, the Wrens, fits Galenson’s schema to a T. Their masterpiece, The Meadowlands, was four years in the making and came fully nine years after their debut. And it matches up with Galenson’s “experimental innovators”—the band tinkered so extensively with the tracks that the band forced themselves to destroy the master tapes as a way of committing to a truly final cut.

Another one that comes to mind is Pulp. Pulp’s breakout album was His ‘N’ Hers, which came out in 1994; their first album came out in 1983, eleven years earlier. That’s quite an incubation. All of their good albums came after their tenth year in the business.

By the way: A few days before Christmas, Gladwell appeared on The Charlie Rose Show, and the resultant segment features both Gladwell and Rose at their best. I also love the show’s new—I think—black website, which seems to reference the show’s trademark table-immersed-in-blackness aesthetic.