I’m referring to the contract not at the social level but at the individual. It is the disassociated relation where the creator and receiver depend on one another symbolically without real physical dependence. — kudos

I suppose that's one way to put it. Would you say this "symbolic dependence" involves something like an intention, promise, obligation... of the parties to the contract?

I suppose a sort of cultural contract would be better fit to describe it. That for my experience as a viewer going to, say, an art gallery expecting to find certain works of a certain type I maintain that expectation with another type, and this goes for whether or not the work is ‘received.’

I’m sorry if this sounds muddled. I’m trying to be clear. — kudos

No need to apologize. I'm here to exercise my power of speech, to sort out my own muddled thinking, to practice interpreting the sayings of others. One of the best reasons to engage in philosophical conversation, if you ask me.

Now if I catch your drift, it sounds like you have in mind something like the expectations or preconceptions with which a consumer engages an artwork, perhaps including expectations of skill-level, medium, genre, style, theme and subtext, even the cultural "identity" of the artist... Is that the right ballpark?

In what sense shall we think of such expectations along the lines of a "contract"? Interesting suggestion.

↪Cabbage Farmer
maybe an example may help?

I visit a music festival and purchase a vinyl disc. This musician might take this as a symbol that this type of music has pleased me, and produce more like it, where in reality it was the cultural act of buying the record itself that was of value for me the receiver, and wasn’t dependent on my buying his record or even any record at all. These two perspectives fall out of alignment. — kudos

Yes, it sounds like this musician has jumped to conclusions.

What if 300,000 units are sold this year? Then I suppose it's reasonable for the musician to infer that the music has something to do with it. Though of course many "extramusical" factors are often involved in the consumption of musical works.

it sounds like you have in mind something like the expectations or preconceptions with which a consumer engages an artwork, perhaps including expectations of skill-level, medium, genre, style, theme and subtext, even the cultural "identity" of the artist... Is that the right ballpark?

It’s in the right ball park. Unfortunately, in my view there are always challenges to discussing these sorts of things because the language used infers a sort of linear relation that if x happens you always get y, and this sort of talk seems to cause misconceptions at such a microscopic level.

In what sense shall we think of such expectations along the lines of a "contract"? Interesting suggestion.

For artists or general public it makes complete sense to view the whole creative process as a type of game where they’re the player. But when we bring up the ideas of creator/receiver for serious introspection, I think it makes sense to include the ways in which those ideas are somehow artificial. Artificial in the sense of being both man-made and of an artifice or external appearance that seems to distract inquiry from their nature. In this way I’m trying to establish the contract that those involved in the creative process adhere to that is foreign to their own perspectives.

Because technologically we’ve reached a level where the cultural conceptions of the creator and the receiver can work almost solely independent and unaffected, we now have more need I think, when considering the process intellectually, to consider them. When I draw a picture on my personal notepad, To me I’m drawing from my experience and spending some time to get better, but when we evaluate the true value such an act has, we can also consider it’s importance as, say, a cultural act of keeping the notion of the drawing or subject alive, and other such mechanisms. I think a large portion of modern creativity is taken up by these mechanisms that we only have knowledge of theoretically. Thus we can’t build such massive structures of thought on simple premises as we’d prefer to.

Cabbage, let me furnish one more example and that's it. Take the occurrence of white rappers. When white rappers came onto the scene via House of Pain, Eminem, etc, some things began changing, all of a sudden white guys everywhere started wearing baggy pants, talking slang, and stuff like that and the sorts of of rap music being created changed. Now did:

a) White rappers influence the kids to wear baggy pants, talk slang and change rap music
b) People start wearing baggy pants, talking slang and rap music underwent change, which influenced the production of white rappers
c) All of the above
d) None of the above
e) From certain perspectives a/b/c/d can be both all true and all false

All we can say for sure is that the act of producing white rap had some significance to reality. So when we're talking about creativity, in my opinion we're speaking about these sorts of processes, where we can substitute the white rapper for the creator. Philosophy then needs to be extra careful about the use of language and internal logic that it employs in order to explain these faculties. But at the same time, the white rappers of the world and the baggy pants wearers may still need to retain their freedoms and liberties to do what they do without being encumbered by all this. However, when it comes to a full philosophical examination, that would bring with it a feeling of inadequacy and misdirection to ignore it.

I hate to be that person who plugs their music https://soundcloud.com/user-142003430/amerikkka

Thanks Thomasina, this is nice. Thanks for the link.