Salon.com: The writer had a problem. Books he read and people he knew had been warning him that the nation and maybe mankind itself had wandered into a sort of creativity doldrums. Economic growth was slackening. The Internet revolution was less awesome than we had anticipated, and the forward march of innovation, once a cultural constant, had slowed to a crawl. One of the few fields in which we generated lots of novelties — financial engineering — had come back to bite us. And in other departments, we actually seemed to be going backward. You could no longer take a supersonic airliner across the Atlantic, for example, and sending astronauts to the moon had become either fiscally insupportable or just passé.
5 comments:
I think one of the problems we're having with creativity and innovation is the gap between the two. The author of this article talks about how "brilliant people, often in the arts or humanities" are studied by "other brilliant people, often in science, finance, or marketing." All children are creative and have the potential to be some kind of artist. I don't think we should be raising all of our kids to be fine arts majors, but I do think that emphasizing this creativity in education more from a young age could have a lasting impression. These kids who would go to business school would still go to business school, we need them to. But they would go there able to engage more parts of their brains in different ways. People in finance could still collaborate with people in the humanities but they would do so with more creativity in the picture. We don't need to entirely change what people study and pursue, we just need to make them more versatile learners. By the time we get to adults who only engage creatively through listening to TED talks or Science Fridays on NPR, its a little late to harness that creativity and turn them into active creators.
I think that creative people should have to target their work towards "none creative" people in order to gain recognition and be considered valuable. I don't think that creativity has to be made into a commodity to be valuable (or non-profits would not exist) but to some extend I think that the general public should have to see value in something for it to really be valuable. If the outside world does not see value in your work then why are you really doing it, I'll give you a hint probably just for self interest and then you are just useless. I do agree with this author that not all people who are creative are good or useful (ie his example of the Nazi's) but over all I think creativity does help drive our civilization forward and helps us to be different than monkeys.
This article made some really good points. I think the world of creativity as seen by the artist and creativity as seen by the business class are two vastly different things. It is true that the professional managerial class feels like they own creativity to some extent. That's part of the reason that books on being a creative person are in the management and leadership section of the school library and not on the arts floor.
I wonder if part of this trend is due to the fact that artist tend to look inwards for creativity, delving into their souls and dreams whereas the business marketplace tends to look towards proven forms of creative achievement at a spring board for future endeavors. That is why books on creativity do nothing for the truly creative soul. We don't look to see how others were creative in our attempts to be creative ourself.
Thats not to say that artist don't study the paintings of past artists and writers don't study past literate when being creative. Understanding the past work in ones field is key to being an active member in said field. But it is not a key to being a creative person. The study and training one puts into the arts is to enhance the medium which one choses to express their creativity.
Part of me feels that books about being creative are useless altogether. Can you really teach someone to "think outside the box" and ignore conventions. Can you teach someone how to daydream? Would it not be better in our fast paced, consumerism based society to teach people to take time out of their day to just be one with nature and embrace quite reflection? I believe that reflection and time spent daydreaming is the only way for one to truly learn to be a creative person.
Wow, this a lot. The idea that creativity as we think of it has become a marketable skill and a comfortable commodity reserved for the professional-managerial class is sad and scary…and probably true.
Self-help books point to the cause and effect of the problem: we are being told that creativity is something that you need to have in order to do well, to be useful and valuable, and we are given the tools to achieve said creativity. Of course, this essentially goes against everything that creativity is supposed to be. I commented about self-help books a while ago; I think that they stem from the way we structure education, and it’s very telling to see that even the concept of creativity has been simplified down to right or wrong answers.
The other day in class we talked about Playground needing to be more innovative, risky, etc… Are we feeding into this phenomenon that Frank describes in his essay? By telling people to propose more creative projects, are we normalizing creativity and taking away the very essence of the thing? I definitely don’t think so, but there’s a great devil’s advocate argument to be made here. It definitely ties into what the writer says about innovation being defined by the established expertise that it’s supposed to be rebelling against.
I really dislike this article. The author seems to be a very cynical person who is incapable of talking about himself if the first person. I see what he is saying about the writing about creativity being very repetitive and aimed at people who do not see themselves as very creative and often with the goal of making money. At the same time I don't see this as a problem and I don't see how this writer is doing anything different. He says that creativity is all about rebelling against the established norms and yet he falls in to all the major norms of what he is doing. I also have a problem with how he says that the world is not currently kind to creative people. He never backs this statement up and I haven't seen this myself. I think that many of the writers (and TED talks) that he puts down are making the world a much better place than this article is.
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