Saved by Dave King and
A brief history of creativity (and power)
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.
Elan Ullendorff • 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.
Elan Ullendorff • A brief history of creativity (and power)
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
The appropriation of creativity from divinity meant that art and artists were thou... See more
Elan Ullendorff • A brief history of creativity (and power)
Science may be the pursuit of truth, but scientific language is adept at dressing up insidious ideologies as fundamental truths.
Elan Ullendorff • A brief history of creativity (and power)
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
Elan Ullendorff • A brief history of creativity (and power)
feels connected somehow to the rene girard stuff I’ve been reading. perhaps the obsession with novelty / originality underpins the critic’s need to name and eliminate the ‘mimetic desires’ from one’s life
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
Elan Ullendorff • 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
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
Elan Ullendorff • A brief history of creativity (and power)
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.
Elan Ullendorff • 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
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