Fewer and fewer people. The art world is similar. Artists should be aware what other artists have done, to not do something unoriginal unintentionally. But t

Fewer and fewer people. The art world is similar. Artists should be aware what other artists have done, to not do something unoriginal unintentionally. But that's hard work because it requires so much time/energy to investigate. So the hard work of art criticism falls on the non-artist who can dedicate him/herself to the task full-time. My analogy is the critic is the codebreaker and the artist is the code-maker. Artists make great critics because they have inside knowledge of how the moves (decisions) are made. But artists often lack the historical perspective, awareness of emerging work and (while I can't read anyone's mind) they typically lack the vocabulary to discuss their decisions analytically. But splitting up the work allows for more specialization. They're both specialists with tons of overlap but they have different goals. So maybe the cryptography world will make the same split, if it hasn't already? Crypto-artists dedicated to creating complexity and then historian-critic-codebreakers to determine the value (strength?) of what was created. They need each other. One creates, the determines the value of it. Anyway, as in art, "naiveté" (no formal education) can sometimes lead to a surprising breakthrough. While it's rare for an uneducated artist to do something interesting, I believe education hinders creativity in some instances. Though most unschooled artists, most of the time, tend to produce the same cliché results as predecessors, they do have the advantage of always thinking outside the box because the box is invisible to them. So outsiders can get breathtakingly weird results sometimes and part of that weirdness is due to their lack of education. It seems to me cryptography is like art in that originality is a goal. In non-objective art especially, you don't want anything recognizable. Like cryptography, non-objective art conceals the true meaning behind the intent. Sometimes cryptography and art even conceal the intent. So creativity allows for infinite approaches and therefore infinite ways to conceal information. Anyway, I don't plan to become a cryptographer but I think it's a cool analogy (to compare to art) and would be interested in learning more about the "big picture" of cryptography if there are any good books on the subject, even if it's fiction.