The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History

as fun as the process may be, it must always come back to someone else’s bottom line, the session must always end.

Advocates of progressive education had long rejected rote learning, seeing it as not only authoritarian but also ineffective. Now they feared the new focus on math and science might exacerbate the problem. At the same time, even some tech-focused reformers were now wary of the problem of static thinking, and so it was that the progressive animosity

Postwar champions of creativity smashed productivity and personal growth together, with professional success serving as the proof of, and means to, a fully realized self.

Creativity was a topic capacious enough to apply to Great Men as well as elementary school children and rank-and-file engineers. Unlike genius, creativity could be said to exist in everyone, and in that sense was both more democratic and (more importantly, perhaps) more useful for managers overseeing scores or hundreds or thousands of employees. It

The fact that they appealed to would-be employees not by highlighting pay, benefits, or esprit de corps, but by emphasizing the opportunity to be creative (in its multiple senses), attests to the challenge of legitimacy the profession was beginning to face along the way. Due to overlapping concerns about white-collar alienation, militarism, and the

The notion that creativity is what makes us human is both toothlessly vague and far too limiting, especially if it makes us think of other very human impulses—to care, to maintain, to collect, to reuse, to copy, to fight, or even to follow—as less relevant.

The creative industries literature also drew on postwar knowledge about the flexible creative personality to make the hip freelancer or independent studio artist, rather than the unionized musician or actor who had been at the heart of the cultural industries, the star of this new economy.

The Synectics approach was to bring marketing in from the beginning.

Synectics presumed that something about the process of creating, rather than the particular form or purpose of the thing being created, motivated people. It didn’t matter whether they were tasked with designing a new hair dryer or a wheelchair or a marketing plan (all Synectics projects, at some point). All of them could, indeed should, engage the

This kind of antiestablishment marketing, whether of chewing gum or yoga pants, powers what Frank calls “a cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the falseness, shoddiness, and everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.”