Creativity

Governments eschew the value of having a creative economy, the value of creativity. Free thinking and creative acting has great benefits. Revolutionary ideas demand it, and can transform the world drastically for the better. Yet, governments rarely actually mean that they would actually like creative ideas. For a start, creative ideas are always and necessarily subversive, and always and necessarily unpopular.

Even in art, projects often list in their success criteria for an idea or submission that it is creative, which is rarely true. Someone, at some point, must after all judge which idea is the most creative. The result must surely be the least fashionable and least popular, criteria which are rarely selected for, and even more rarely desirable. Sometimes, briefs or specifications for art projects request that a proposal is creative and engages the public, which is impossible. Creativity and public engagement are opposites. The more creative you are, the more out of step with median opinion. That's what being creative means.

The creative idea is any idea that differs from consensus. The more creative the idea, the more it differs from the consensus view. This also shows why creativity is related to madness because a mad idea is also an idea that differs from consensus.

This understanding has important implications for artists, as art is an industry driven by creativity. An artist must choose between a creative idea, which is unpopular, or a popular idea that is uncreative. People tend to need a degree of popularity to survive. There are many more uncreative artists successfully creating their mediocre, mainstream paintings, objects, designs, than genuinely creative artists.

One must also ask, what benefit does the supremely creative idea have, if it is unpopular with everyone? Of course, ideas and tastes change, and one important factor of art is in driving trends. Art creates new, unpopular, ideas, which become popular. This is why creativity is important, it is the embryo of the future. Change is inevitable, and the creative idea determines what things change into.

Mark Sheeky, 13 October 2017