To look at the shelves of bookstores these days (if any still exist in your
neighborhood), one might think that this is a time in which creativity is hot. Titles about creativity – explaining it, unleashing it, using it to galvanize artistic fulfillment and business
success – abound. But is this trend evidence that we are living in an age of
unprecedented innovation? Is any meaningful, transformative creativity actually
taking place, or is it all just hype and buzzphrases like “thinking outside the
box”?
Amid this celebration of creativity, it’s easy to forget that for most of
history, creativity has been resisted, not encouraged. In past eras people clung
to received wisdom and tended initially to reject, often violently, new concepts
and creative leaps forward, not embrace them. Christ, as an obvious example,
was crucified for ideas that threatened the reigning political and religious
authorities of the time; I hardly need to point out what a far-reaching impact
those ideas went on to have. Galileo’s sun-centered astronomical views earned
him censorship and imprisonment from the Church Inquisition in his own day; but
he is now considered by many to be the father of modern astronomy. When the Impressionists
dared to debut their (at that time) startling vision at an 1874 Paris
exhibition, they were universally reviled and ridiculed by critics and the
public alike; today the movement is considered the genesis of modern art.
Visionary creativity – disorienting
breakthroughs like the ones above – is generated by outsiders, rebels, bold individuals
who dare to turn conventional wisdom on its head and face the consequences.
Creation is a radical act, and society can handle only so much “shock of the
new,” as art critic Robert Hughes titled his excellent 1980 documentary series. So rebels very often pay a steep price
for their daring.
But the new literature of creativity seems to be less about rebellion than convention.
Salon recently reposted a Harper’s
magazine article by Thomas Frank which examined the popularity of
books about creativity. The more books about it Frank read, the more
conventional and repetitive and, well, uncreative
they all sounded, until he realized that the genre was less about
creativity than “superstition, in which everything always worked out and the
good guys always triumphed and the right inventions always came along in the
nick of time”:
What determines
“creativity,” in other words, is the very faction it’s supposedly rebelling
against: established expertise… [F]or
all its reverential talk about the rebel and the box breaker, society had no
interest in new ideas at all unless they reinforced favorite theories or could
be monetized in some obvious way.
Where creativity used to be the domain of the genius, the seer, the artist,
the inventor, Frank claims that the new “creativity promoting sector” targets “the
professional-managerial audience itself, whose members… think they’re in the
presence of something profound when they watch some billionaire give a TED
talk. And what this complacent literature purrs into their ears is that
creativity is their property, their competitive advantage, their class virtue.”
I was reminded of a controversial TV commercial in the ‘80s that used John
Lennon’s distorted guitar and raw vocals to sell Nike shoes. “Revolution” was
the first Beatles song licensed for commercials, and it was the beginning of
the end for rock music, which up to that point had been a musical expression of
anti-establishment rebellion – a rage against the machine, if you will. But Madison
Avenue simply defused the insurrection by co-opting rock and turning it into the
soundtrack for corporate sales. Classic rock has been reduced to Baby Boomer
nostalgia, and contemporary rock is now so utterly toothless that it’s hard to
imagine there was a time when rock threatened the existing social order.
Creativity, Frank seems to be saying, might be entering a similar phase of
de-radicalization, with “the professional-managerial” class co-opting it,
monetizing it, and channeling it for
corporate interests.
His class-based paranoia seems overstated. We may be seeing the
fad-ification, so to speak, of creativity, but not the death or even the
hijacking of it. The “professional-managerial class” can claim no monopoly on
creativity, and though we may initially reject them, geniuses, seers, artists, and
inventors will continue to disprove Ecclesiastes, who asserted 2000 years ago
that there is nothing new under the sun.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 11/22/13)
