Cultural Worker, Not A “Creative”

The demarcation between enmeshed concepts of creativity (the making of a sculpture, the writing of a book, the painting of a still life, the composing of a quartet, the penning of a poem) and activism (the joining of a protest, the marching for a cause, the laying of one’s body before a bulldozer, the willingness to be arrested for the right to cle

In the marketplace, the word creativity has come to mean the generation of ideas applicable to practical strategies to make larger profits. This reduction has gone on so long that the word creative can hardly be degraded further. I don’t use it any more, yielding it to capitalists and academics to abuse as they like.

The artist, in other words, was a model of creativity, and the benefit of the artistic way of being was not art itself but something else. There was something paradoxical about this: It held art apart from the ordinary, the commercial, the technological. Yet it promoted art not for its own sake—that is, say, for the production of aesthetic objects—

For several decades, the price of this belief has been creatives’ difficulty in conceiving of their work as labour – and by extension, to benefit from the gains of other workers’ struggles.