Given how a lot we obsess over it, the idea of creativity can really feel like one thing that has at all times existed, a factor philosophers and artists have contemplated and debated all through the ages. Whereas it’s an inexpensive assumption, it’s one which seems to be very improper. As Samuel Franklin explains in his latest guide, The Cult of Creativity, the primary identified written use of creativity didn’t really happen till 1875, “making it an toddler so far as phrases go.” What’s extra, he writes, earlier than about 1950, “there have been roughly zero articles, books, essays, treatises, odes, lessons, encyclopedia entries, or something of the type dealing explicitly with the topic of ‘creativity.’”
This raises some apparent questions. How precisely did we go from by no means speaking about creativity to at all times speaking about it? What, if something, distinguishes creativity from different, older phrases, like ingenuity, cleverness, creativeness, and artistry? Possibly most necessary: How did everybody from kindergarten lecturers to mayors, CEOs, designers, engineers, activists, and ravenous artists come to imagine that creativity isn’t simply good—personally, socially, economically—however the reply to all life’s issues?
Fortunately, Franklin gives some potential solutions in his guide. A historian and design researcher on the Delft College of Expertise within the Netherlands, he argues that the idea of creativity as we now understand it emerged through the publish–World Warfare II period in America as a form of cultural salve—a method to ease the tensions and anxieties brought on by rising conformity, forms, and suburbanization.
“Sometimes outlined as a form of trait or course of vaguely related to artists and geniuses however theoretically possessed by anybody and relevant to any discipline, [creativity] supplied a method to unleash individualism inside order,” he writes, “and revive the spirit of the lone inventor throughout the maze of the fashionable company.”
INSTITUTE OF PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY/THE MONACELLI PRESS
I spoke to Franklin about why we proceed to be so fascinated by creativity, how Silicon Valley turned the supposed epicenter of it, and what function, if any, applied sciences like AI might need in reshaping our relationship with it.
I’m curious what your private relationship to creativity was rising up. What made you wish to write a guide about it?
Like loads of children, I grew up pondering that creativity was this inherently good factor. For me—and I think about for lots of different individuals who, like me, weren’t significantly athletic or good at math and science—being inventive meant you no less than had some future on this world, even when it wasn’t clear what that future would entail. By the point I bought into faculty and past, the traditional knowledge among the many TED Discuss register of thinkers—folks like Daniel Pink and Richard Florida—was that creativity was really probably the most necessary trait to have for the long run. Principally, the inventive folks had been going to inherit the Earth, and society desperately wanted them if we had been going to unravel all of those compounding issues on this planet.
On the one hand, as somebody who appreciated to consider himself as inventive, it was laborious to not be flattered by this. Alternatively, all of it appeared overhyped to me. What was being bought because the triumph of the inventive class wasn’t really leading to a extra inclusive or inventive world order. What’s extra, a few of the values embedded in what I name the cult of creativity appeared more and more problematic—particularly, the deal with self-realization, doing what you’re keen on, and following your ardour. Don’t get me improper—it’s a lovely imaginative and prescient, and I noticed it work out for some folks. However I additionally began to really feel prefer it was only a cowl for what was, economically talking, a reasonably unhealthy flip of occasions for many individuals.
