Thinking outside "outside the box"

The artist is a discoverer, not an inventor.

Whether our society chooses to describe something as creative or destructive is at best in the eye of the beholder and at worst entirely deceptive. Communities, livelihoods, and ecosystems are routinely destroyed in the pursuit of so-called creativity. Creativity at Facebook arguably destroyed local news. Creativity in fast-fashion is catastrophic ... See more

What if we understood that, much like a world would cease to be a world without ongoing preservation, a bridge would cease to be a bridge if we allowed it to crumble and fall instead of actively reinforcing it? Would we spend our resources differently? What if we saw conservation not just as a matter of routine but as existentially creative? Perhap... See more

at what point did we decide that the person who draws a garment on the back of a napkin in five minutes is exercising creativity, but not the person who sits at the sewing machine for years repeatedly making that same garment? As a culture, we have chosen to make a distinction between creativity and the labor of reproduction. But what is reproducti... See more

Our idea of progress is so bound up with the idea of putting something new in the world that it can feel counterintuitive to equate progress with destruction, removal, and remediation. But this seeming contradiction actually points to a deeper contradiction: of destruction (e.g., of ecosystems) framed as construction (e.g., of dams). Nineteenth-cen... See more

In “A Brief History of Creativity”, I argued that the story of creativity as we know it in the Western world is a story of divine power, a power that has been removed from some and granted unequally to others. Because of that, we should be suspicious, or at least not take it as a given, when certain people are called "creatives" and not others. Her... See more