Art takes the heat in this advertisement for a heartburn remedy Image via Dzine blog
‘Creativity’ is the new buzz-word in arts funding, sponsorship and administration, as well as in other spheres of government, business, education, training and personal development.
A recent piece on Arts Hub How to Have Creative Conversations tells us how to ‘spark creativity and collaboration’ (another buzzword), citing a study by ‘the Social Psychological and Personality Science (SAGE)’ alongside ‘author and journalist Myke Bartlett’ – who ‘points out that all kinds of art are essentially a conversation’ and talks knowledgeably about ‘the creative process’ – and then proceeds to tell us in detail ‘how to add a dash of creativity to your next conversation around the water cooler’ (which I’m sure will be of great interest to all those artists out there who spend their time around a water cooler).
Another recent essay on Arts Hub by Dean of Law at Swinburne Professor Dan Hunter on Why Cash and Copyright are Bad News for Creativity begins by conceding that ‘creativity is a tricky thing to understand’ before going on to claim that ‘one thing we do know about creativity is that a really good way to make people less creative is to pay them’. Professor Hunter bases this claim on ‘a series of studies’ by motivational psychologists allegedly showing that ‘primary school kids don’t learn to read if they’re paid to, artists produce their worst work if they’re paid to produce it, and people get worse at solving puzzles better if you reward them for creative solutions’.
Perhaps the findings of motivational psychology need to be handled with a little more caution when it comes to art, arts law or business ethics. Motivating children to read or adults to solve puzzles strikes me as being of dubious relevance to artists; and I’m sure Michelangelo would be interested to learn that he did his ‘worst work’ on commission.
The jargon of creativity is now well-established in the language of arts bureaucratese. 2013 saw the launch of the long-awaited (and short-lived) ‘Creative Nation’ cultural policy document by the previous Labor federal government. The same year saw the launch of Creative Partnerships Australia, which according to its website aims ‘to innovate giving to the arts in support of creating sustainable and robust creative industries in Australia’. Meanwhile the Arts Victoria states that ‘on 1 January 2015 Arts Victoria formally transitioned into Creative Victoria, a new State Government body dedicated to supporting, championing and growing the arts and creative industries’. Rumour has it that the WA Department of Culture and the Arts is shortly to follow suit.
Alongside the arts industry, the phrase ‘creative industries’ generally comprises advertising and marketing, fashion and design, toys and games, software and computer games. Indeed the term ‘creative’ began being used as a noun in the 60s in the advertising industry, presumably in an effort to dignify the latter with connotations of artistic merit. With the increasing corporatisation of the arts, this usage has since returned to haunt the theatre industry, where it now applies to the director and design team – though significantly not the actors, who as skills-based artists are presumably not deemed ‘creative’ enough to deserve the title or bounce ideas off each other in ‘creative meetings’
In philosophical and psychological terms, art is to be distinguished from creativity and the imagination. As Kant pointed out, the imagination is a faculty that performs an essential synthetic role in all thought and experience. Under this faculty, the capacity for aesthetic contemplation may be further distinguished from creativity, the latter being what Kant’s contemporary Schiller identified as the capacity for play.
However, while everyone is at least in principle capable of imagining, contemplating, creating, playing or watching others play – and by extension enjoying or even making art – it doesn’t follow that everyone is an artist (or a critic). Alongside a heightened capacity for imagination or creativity – which may or may not also manifest itself as a particular talent or gift for a specific activity like drawing, writing, singing, dancing, playing an instrument or even looking and listening – becoming an artist requires time, effort and discipline in the acquisition of skills, technique, knowledge and experience; and perhaps even the development of a personal vision. This is a far cry from simply being ‘imaginative’ or even ‘creative’.
The difference between art and creativity is not merely psychological or ontological but also social and historical. When I say ‘artist’ or ‘critic’ (or even more specifically, for example, ‘actor’ or ‘theatre critic’) I imply a socially and historically determined activity, occupation, profession or vocation like teaching, law or medicine – regardless of whether it’s also a source of employment (although of economic necessity one generally entails the other).
In short: the terms ‘artist’ or ‘critic’ are social categories, with an attendant history that cannot be reduced to the psychology of personality. The first time I called myself an actor was when I was in my thirties and filling out an arrival form on an international flight. It was the simplest way to describe what I do, rather than being a profound statement about what I am.
This is not to insist on social hierarchies or the division of labour. As Marx wrote, in an ideal world we would all be able to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, raise cattle in the evenings and philosophize after dinner. In the meantime however, like most things, having artists and being an artist in our society involves making a sacrifices and comes at a cost. Otherwise (as Marx also wrote) ‘all that is solid melts into air’.
In the ancient world, creativity and talent were viewed as external forces or gifts from the gods; in the Middle Ages they were regarded as being divinely inspired and directed by God. During the Renaissance this changed with the emergence of the cult of the individual artist, and the process was further secularised by the Reformation and refined by the Enlightenment. The notion of ‘the creative genius’ became a central feature of Romanticism, and largely prevailed throughout Modernism up until roughly the Second World War. With the onset of postmodernism in the post-War era, the notion of ‘genius’ begins to evaporate, and with it the separation between artforms and the distinction between art, entertainment and industrial production. Enter Andy Warhol and The Factory.
Perhaps it’s no accident that in the age of de-differentiation the affect of indifference or ‘cool’ becomes the dominant aesthetic style and form of response. This indifferent coolness is accentuated as artistic production and consumption become increasingly organised along industrial lines, and are increasingly divorced from the body or physical presence of the artist, artwork or audience with the advent of digital technology and the ubiquity of the screen in post-industrial society.
If the process of professional differentiation was characteristic of modernity, then perhaps a generalized de-differentiation of all spheres of human activity and identity is characteristic of postmodern globalized capitalism (with a concomittant regression from what Durkheim called ‘organic’ to ‘mechanical’ solidarity as the binding agent of community and culture – which in the language of the internet is now euphemistically called ‘connectivity’). In place of specialization we now see a simplified division of labour into three classes: the owners of the means of production (governments and corporates working hand-in-hand in ‘creative partnership’), their salaried managers (bureaucracy and administration) and a contract labour force (which includes ‘creatives’).
Meanwhile difference between one form of industry or organization and another begins to disappear. Such a regression in social terms is analogous to a de-differentiation of biological cells in organic life. As such, artists are reduced to being little more than fungible ‘creative’ stem-cells that can be successfully cultivated and grafted into the body-politic of an increasingly de-differentiated post-industrial labour market.
More from Humphrey Bower on the relationship between creative industries and the arts.
