The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History

By 1963 Maslow noted, “my feeling is that the concept of creativeness and the concept of the healthy, self-actualizing, fully human person seem to be coming closer and closer together, and may perhaps turn out to be the same thing.” It was perhaps a bit of self-fulfilling prophesy. At a moment when both concepts were still very much embryonic, Masl

Despite the fact that many in the postwar American art world embraced self-expression and experimentation, it turns out the efforts to really get under the hood of something called creativity—which also encompassed ideas like “creative ability,” “the creative personality,” and “the creative process”—were primarily driven by a concern not for art pe

We work gigs (the artsy phrase is not a coincidence), and even though a lot of work seems as rote and pointless as ever, we try hard to follow the instructions Steve Jobs bestowed upon the Stanford graduating class of 2005: “do what you love.”

As psychoanalysts got to work adjusting returning GIs and newly re-domesticated housewives to the bewildering modern age, many postwar neo-Freudians, including the humanist psychologists, took a more critical approach. Suddenly acutely wary of mass society, they were less interested in adjusting individuals to potentially sick social norms than in

By insisting that everything from scientific theories to battlefield maneuvers to consumer gadgets to parenting tricks were the results of “creative thinking,” Osborn reduced each particular feat to an interchangeable unit called the “idea,” which anyone could have. This was the dignifying sleight of hand, the flattering oversimplification behind O

This was one of the ways in which class, gender, race, and the conditions of labor were naturalized and universalized as innate personality traits, and creativity subtly transformed from an effect (an accomplishment or a behavior) into a cause (a psychological state).

The problem, Bass reiterated, was not the method itself, but the way in which it had become “a substitute and symbol of creativity.”

The claim that people buy ideas rather than products, the conceit at the core of today’s branding-design complex, was at the time a startling and somewhat unsettling assertion.

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