Did that headline get your attention? In our culture “creative” is very frequently a synonym for “good”. Okay, you probably don’t want the driver of the car beside yours driving creatively, and you’d likely acknowledge that burgeoning creativity wouldn’t be advisable for the structural engineer behind the Hoover Dam, or the accountants at Enron. But if these people don’t have some creative hobby, you still might look at them askance.
In his article How Creativity is Killing the Culture, Michael Fallon argues that our unexamined ideal of creativity amounts to a cultural sickness. If everyone is taught in school that creative expression is the highest measure of virtue, only rebels and failures would choose to pursue more technical-seeming disciplines such as mathematics, engineering, and the sciences. Why, we might even have to start importing these people from other countries!
This is not to say that creative expression is the same thing as creativity. Good creative expression requires not merely creativity, but also technical talent and discipline. Conversely, the most gifted physicists and mathematicians absolutely require lateral thinking and intuitive leaps. In other words, any work that is purely, actually left-brained or right-brained cannot achieve genius.
But we do this idea one better. Fallon says our emphasis is not on creativity per se, but rather creative expression. What you get when you push everyone to express themselves creatively, even those with no particular inclination or talent, is a lot of bad art and a lot of frustrated people who feel as though they need to spend more time finding themselves. Story of my generation?
Okay, that is a cynic’s view of the situation. I’m going to step back for a second and admit that I don’t completely buy Fallon’s argument. While it is bad that our could-be-Einsteins are drifting through art school instead, I think it’s every bit as tragic for someone who could have become a brilliant artist to become trapped in an accounting job. Each person has an obligation to follow her gift, and everybody needs a hobby.
We were taught to express ourselves. Some of us ignored our teachers; some of us sought an expressive hobby, or post to YouTube on occasion; some of us are struggling to make a living in an over-saturated world of professional artists and craftsmen; many of us graduated with a liberal arts degree and have no idea what to do with ourselves now. It’s hard to have a lot of sympathy for a dis-ease that’s rooted in privilege, but if the end result is (in Fallon’s words) “a nation of navel-gazing dreamy-eyed so-called creatives who no longer consider it worthwhile to roll up their sleeves and get down to hard work to get a job done”, then it’s everybody’s problem.
But wait a second, isn’t that almost verbatim my grandparents’ complaint about the hippie generation? Is it so bad if we’re becoming a nation of artists? In fact, this is exactly what John Adams hoped for the generations that succeeded him:
I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.
The certainties of the past were born of necessity. If we’re spending a lot of time finding ourselves, well, perhaps that’s a suitable way to enjoy of the freedoms that our parents, and their parents, have purchased us. If quantity of art, or the number of art-producers, is the benchmark of a culture, then we are certainly surpassing any that has come before us.
We do need brilliant engineers, though, and architects and computer scientists and natural scientists. I hope that we can afford these sexy professions the wreath of creative mastery that they so desperately deserve.
8 Comments
I do feel this has become a problem. Not that engineers aren’t creative in their own way, but that many things are ruined by people trying to be creative with them. I need to continually check myself to be sure I want to be an artist, that I’m not wasting a scientific brain, because I consider myself a relatively uncreative artist, nearly anti-art in my love of the “sexy professions” and celebration of logical capacity. Which is not to say that I’ve just flipped the priorities upside down again, because it’s not a dichotomy in the first place.
Let it come as no surprise that I quickly step up to argue completely counter to the point(s) this gentleman makes.
I’ll state that people aren’t creative enough. Let me also add a note about the original article: just as I’m known for making completely wacko statements about gender divisions that are often out of touch due to the very specific environment I find myself in daily, I question the validity of a sweeping statement from someone in the art field. He’s an art critique, yes? Hardly one to point fingers that folks arn’t “rolling up the sleeves to get work done.”
It’s spoken like a man who’s time is coming to an end and is lashing out at the world for taking away- or at least minimizing- his field. His closing paragraph reads like a angerly shaken fist at the Web 2.0 movement. He mocks niche interests which do not appeal to him. But that’s the point of this developing future. I don’t like much popular art, but I’m extremely interested in my niche fields. Endless craft groups are just people trying to reach out and connect to others. People no longer want to be defined by mass interests and consumerism. Or at least- ideally they don’t.
I think the ongoing, strengthening cry for “creativity” is an attempt to beat back a surge of mindless consumerism. Now this may not be the correct solution, but to mock it fails to look at the larger issue. Is he perhaps one to approve of the cutting of art classes in children’s education? The number of points that caused my hackles to rise in the article are numerous. But you agreed that some of his argument is flawed so I’ll not numerate all of them.
It seems that there is an issue of apathy and indifference and that creativity is the solution people have latched on to as a cure when perhaps that other wicked “c” word is the real solution. Critical Thinking. But it’s easier for the market to cry creativity since you can still sell things under that flag. But critical thinking is even more difficult to impose and has much riskier results.
I asked my Adam if he felt he was creative and he replied no. But he is critical. It is a healthy mix of these two things that produces the best environments and that’s exactly what’s lacking in a lot of areas. Your awful author bemoans two issues, the Web 2.0 horizon and the (re?)introduction of one c without the other.
p.s. - Don’t even get me started on snooty artist people. Or the definition of art. Or the differences between art and craft.
I suppose I’m too much into the whole Renaissance/well-rounded thing: I feel it is important to be creative and diligent- to understand and love science and art.
As for teaching that “creative expression is the highest measure of virtue,” my experience is that this is only true in art, music, and creative writing classes. Drill drill drill, memorize memorize is often the way of schooling, at least the public schools I am accustomed to, the ones that are cutting their art and music programs because they “aren’t necessary for a career.”
I don’t believe that an overemphasis on creativity is the result of people coming from other countries to be our engineers. Many of them, my parents included, came here because they were just as good as the ones here, only they could make a good deal more money here.
If art is now being made by more people, and there’s a lot of bad art out there, how is this different from computer programs being made by more (with many computer programs being…er…unsatisfactory)? It simply means that creating art can now be for more people, that they are given more options, that it can be a hobby and not a profession. And I think being able to express oneself both creatively and through more traditional avenues gives us more variety of output.
This is total crap. Physics is just as worthless and meaningless a path of study in “the real world” as art history or anything like that. I feel we have been spoiled by the advances in physics in the 20th century. Yes, sometimes you get quantum mechanics, but more often you get string theory. Likewise, with literature, sometimes you get great literary minds, more often you get worthless circle-jerking.
Academia is about skimming off the %.1 of the endeavor that matters to society at all. Period. Being a scientist doesn’t give you a magical “worthwhile field.”
What seems missing in your scheme is the distinction betwen enthusiasms and livelihoods. Somwhere–I think it’s in Longer Views–Samuel Delaney says something like: “Of course I write poetry. All cultivated people do. I just don’t show it to anyone.” A pursuit doesn’t need to be professional or professional-level to be worthwhile; nor does it have to be valuable to anyone else to be valuable.
I think it’s good for the culture as a whole if our chemists compose villanelles and our painters can hack code. Sadly, my experience of certain universities in Rhode Island was, as you suggest, that the flow was overwhelmingly in one direction. Scientists were often anxious to enrich themselves with some exposure to the humanities. Those in the arts were less attuned to how the sciences offered enrichment of their own.
I think that when the teacher tells the student to go out and write a paper on what they do in their life that is creative, it is important that the student ask, “Why?”
Why should they have to justify themselves as a “creative” person? Why should creativity be prized so highly, if it is assumed that everyone has it?
I believe that people who desire an output for their creativity, manage to find it on their own. There are real life concerns that interfere with it, just like with anything else. Perhaps I no longer create abstract photoshop filter art because I do not have the time or inclination to do so. Part of it may have to do with other endeavours I am engaged in that I would call creative. But, I do not think that people need to be ordered to be creative in order for them to do so.
I do not see a distinction between science and art, except that science is viewed as “useful to society” and art is viewed as “fun to have around.” Bridge building is ’science’, writing a personal narrative about how you built the Golden Gate bridge is ‘art’. I think that I can agree with the author of the article in so far as the perception of the “maths and sciences” as uncreative is a harmful one. Also (I agree with his assertion that) the mere order to be creative is insufficient to generate quality content from the would-be artist.
To me, “creative” is more about the generating of something, than about it being different from everything else out there. Everytime I create a short story, a poem, a program, a proof, it is new for me in some way. I may take others’ ideas, I may take my own, and shape them or even barely modify them. But in my head, there is a unique signature of synapses firing in a my private little orchestra of creativity.
Vinnie, I think part of the problem is the classes themselves. As an English major, I would have loved to take more intro science courses–I had a great time in Extraterrestrial Geo. But, with one or two exceptions, math and science courses are harder than, at least, English courses.
I would have liked to learn more about science. But it would have involved doing more work than I ever did for my major, and I’m not a masochist (I say before heading off for a 9 AM root canal…).
I’m with Vinnie Tesla, in a way. I think a distinction needs to be drawn between creative expression and creative expression as a livlihood, and that Fallon seems more interested in Bewailing These Degenerate Days than in pushing into the problem in any useful way.
I think that self-expression is necessary for people to be happy, and that the types we label as “creative” are as good a way as any, although they require approximately as much work as learning to use language all over again. And I support encouraging people to express themselves in non-destructive ways, especially if the expression takes the form of communication with other people (through writing, art, whatever).
Where it gets dicey, IMO, is the idea of generating enough money to live on, solely through the use of one’s creative expression. That’s extraordinarily hard, and almost always requires rethinking how much is “enough money to live on”. A dose of “don’t quit your day job” variety pragmatism would probably be useful nowadays.
But then again, I can’t blame people too much. The world is changing very fast, and it’s incredibly tempting to try to harness that change. I succumb to the urge myself, on occasion. :)