The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History

But a little shift back to an appreciation of the power of collective goals, to an ethic of care and maintenance, a love of art not necessarily for art’s sake but for more than just a stimulus of new ideas, a respect for thoughtful research and knowledge, and above all the space to question the goodness of the new might just be the big idea we need

When I look around it seems to me most of the biggest problems actually have a plethora of solutions already lined up, and the necessary technology chugging along at approximately the rate we choose to prioritize it. What’s lacking is the political will. It ultimately serves the status quo to convince us that we suffer not from one big problem with

Aggressively uncreative practices such as aimless wandering or birdwatching (or, as she perceptively calls it, “bird listening”) offer “an antidote to the rhetoric of growth” that surrounds us every day. There is ultimately a feminist and environmental case to be made for doing nothing: if we can shift our notion of constructive social behavior fro

By pointing out the roots of the cult of creativity in Cold War capitalism I do not mean to argue that it’s tainted or compromised, or that it will doom any progressive agenda that embraces it. I’m simply saying we shouldn’t imagine there is some kind of pure spirit of creativity to reclaim.

As we saw, the concept of creativity was forged as a psychological solution to structural problems, in an age that preferred to see problems in psychological terms. In many ways we are still in such an era—see how quickly we turn to medical and neurological explanations for widespread problems like loneliness and depression that have profound socia

Yes, institutional calcification is a real phenomenon, and leaders who come from outside and aren’t afraid to shake things up can be incredibly generative (as long as “shaking things up” isn’t just a euphemism for privatizing, downsizing, etc.). But when the whole business of “changing the world” reflexively demeans career experts and specialists a

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 thesis seems to be that each advance, from the Pythagorean Theorem to Marxism to the atom bomb to the Boeing 747, came ultimately from one person’s desire to express their individuality. This claim—more believable in the case of an oil painting than in the invention of TNT—is, as we’ve seen, the kernel of the postwar concept of creativity itsel

Despite the waning of the Cold War and the Fordist order, creativity researchers have continued to be motivated by a fear that the institutions of modern society are hampering progress, and a faith that only through creative thinking can civilization be saved.