A brief history of creativity (and power)

When we look at the evolution of creativity, one story that can be told is that it was a concept designed to extricate divine procreative power from women and give it to men.

There are other stories to tell as well. In the twentieth century, creativity became enmeshed with capitalistic productivity, and its study was largely centered around the fiel... See more

‍With few exceptions, the ancient Greeks did not seem to value newness; on the contrary, they idealized the precise observation and replication of the old. Even the arts, which today seem conceptually inseparable from the pursuit of novelty, were for the moment expressed through rules (the Greek word for art, techne , literally means “the making of... See more

It is not until Christian theology that gods began creating from nothing ( ex nihilo ), rather from existing materials: "Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made" (John 1:3). During the Renaissance, this doctrine of ex nihilo was applied to people—specifically, artists.

Science may be the pursuit of truth, but scientific language is adept at dressing up insidious ideologies as fundamental truths.

‍Aristotle took this counterfactual account one step further by elevating it to the level of science, claiming that semen is the primary creator of life, and that the woman's body is only material for the semen to work with.

Historian Gerda Lerner says that this marks a "counterfactual account of the origin of human life" in which man is literally the woman's mother.

It was a seventeenth century Latin poet, Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, who at last broke the seal and used the word that would forever connect the inventiveness of art explicitly with divinity, saying that the poet "creates anew" ( de novo creat ) in the manner of god.

The appropriation of creativity from divinity meant that art and artists were thou... See more

When I hear artists and AI evangelists argue about whether people who generate text using ChatGPT or images using Midjourney are truly creative, I wonder about the question behind the question.

How we get from a goddess creating through birth to the (typically male) creative entrepreneurs on the covers of magazines is mainly a story about power. Slowly but surely, male gods climbed the creative ladder, first assisting goddesses in procreation, but eventually overtaking them, as people sought out forms of religious worship that more closel... See more

When we look at the evolution of creativity, one story that can be told is that it was a concept designed to extricate divine procreative power from women and give it to men.