The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History

Indeed, as always, the quest for creativity, be it in academia or in applied creativity, is most often implicitly or explicitly oriented around industry.

The agent of this transformation would be the “creative man”: somewhere between an artist and a salesman, a liminal figure within if not totally comfortable with the business world, paradoxically committed to his own vision and his clients’ needs simultaneously, a resident gadfly who would be the humane and rebellious face of capitalism and its ult

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

It’s as if the intervention itself—an intervention against the “Great Man” theory of history (that nonetheless regularly praises great men), and against the supposed elitism and obscurantism of the Romantics (that nonetheless tries to re-enchant our everyday existence)—is what the concept of creativity allows people to do.

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.

But brainstorming, Bass thought, was an ersatz creativity. “The chief danger of brainstorming lies . . . not in the question of whether or not it produces more or less ideas . . . but in fact, that it distorts the creative process by dealing with it piecemeal and putting it on the production line.

In fact the creative person was by definition one who put their open-mindedness to work. “The creative individual not only respects the irrational in himself,” Barron explained, “but courts it as the most promising source of novelty in his own thought.”42 The creative person, he wrote, is one who solves “problems external to himself” and “creates h

we speak of today’s “creative” as both an economic role and a type, with particular consumption patterns, work habits, and personalities.

It’s a savvy rhetorical maneuver. The “everybody thinks x but it’s really y” formula, whether or not everybody really thinks x, is the starting point for nearly every work of popular nonfiction, and a good chunk of academic writing too. But it also says something about the deeper logic of the genre.