Given how a lot we obsess over it, the idea of creativity can really feel like one thing that has all the time existed, a factor philosophers and artists have contemplated and debated all through the ages. Whereas it’s an affordable assumption, it’s one which seems to be very incorrect. As Samuel Franklin explains in his latest ebook, The Cult of Creativity, the primary recognized 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 all the time speaking about it? What, if something, distinguishes creativity from different, older phrases, like ingenuity, cleverness, creativeness, and artistry? Perhaps most essential: How did everybody from kindergarten academics 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 presents some potential solutions in his ebook. A historian and design researcher on the Delft College of Expertise within the Netherlands, he argues that the idea of creativity as we now realize it emerged in the course of the put up–World Warfare II period in America as a type of cultural salve—a solution to ease the tensions and anxieties attributable to rising conformity, paperwork, and suburbanization.
“Usually outlined as a type of trait or course of vaguely related to artists and geniuses however theoretically possessed by anybody and relevant to any discipline, [creativity] offered a solution to unleash individualism inside order,” he writes, “and revive the spirit of the lone inventor throughout the maze of the trendy 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 grew to become the supposed epicenter of it, and what function, if any, applied sciences like AI may 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 ebook about it?
Like a whole lot of youngsters, I grew up considering that creativity was this inherently good factor. For me—and I think about for lots of different individuals who, like me, weren’t notably athletic or good at math and science—being artistic meant you a minimum of had some future on this world, even when it wasn’t clear what that future would entail. By the point I bought into school and past, the standard knowledge among the many TED Speak register of thinkers—individuals like Daniel Pink and Richard Florida—was that creativity was really probably the most essential trait to have for the longer term. Mainly, the artistic individuals 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 the earth.
On the one hand, as somebody who preferred to think about himself as artistic, it was laborious to not be flattered by this. Alternatively, all of it appeared overhyped to me. What was being offered because the triumph of the artistic class wasn’t really leading to a extra inclusive or artistic world order. What’s extra, among 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 like, and following your ardour. Don’t get me incorrect—it’s a fantastic imaginative and prescient, and I noticed it work out for some individuals. However I additionally began to really feel prefer it was only a cowl for what was, economically talking, a fairly dangerous flip of occasions for many individuals.