![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/creativity.jpg\" "\\"creativity\\"")
<\/a>In The Masque of Augurs, Ben Jonson introduces the comic figure of Vangoose, a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153rare artist\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and producer of masques with a reputation for the wildly fantastical. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Now we would bring in some dainty new thing, dat never was, nor never sal be, in de rebus nature\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 a mere \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcdevisa\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 of the brain,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the artist promises his Jacobean audience. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If it go from de nature of de ting, it is de more art; for dere is art, and dere is nature, you sall see.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\nVangoose\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s obvious difficulty with the English language is not due solely to his being Dutch. The 17th century had no word, in Dutch or English, for the quality of artistic creation he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s trying to describe. Astonishingly, the word \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccreativity\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 only entered the English language in 1927 in a lecture by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. For more than two millennia before that, Plato\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s philosophical verdict in The Republic that a painter \u00e2\u20ac\u0153merely imitates\u00e2\u20ac\u009d held sway, and the advent of Christianity didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t shake it. If anything, it reinforced it. Leonardo could go so far as to claim that an artist uses \u00e2\u20ac\u0153shapes that do not exist in nature\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but he could go no further, since \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccreatio ex nihilo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 was the sole prerogative of the Creator. It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t until the Enlightenment, when Joseph Addison dared to suggest that human imagination \u00e2\u20ac\u0153has something in it like creation\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, that the divine monopoly on creativity was broken. In the next century, Romanticism finished the job.<\/p>\n
Today, creativity is as common as muck. We find the word \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccreative\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 applied to everything from art and writing to psychology, philosophy, and technology, not to mention accounting. Like so much else, it has gone cross-disciplinary \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it has even jumped lexical categories to become a noun referring to someone working in advertising. But the most significant change of the past 20 years has been not in its range of applications but in its meaning. As the American psychologist Michael Mumford noted in Creativity Research Journal a decade ago, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153we seem to have reached a general agreement that creativity involves the production of novel, useful products [my italics].\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Out of the Romantic cult of an economically useless imaginative faculty has grown the dreary McKinseyite concept of a mental ability to be cultivated for the purposes of productivity. So we have \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccreative industry professionals\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 hot-desking in \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccreative hubs\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcincubator spaces\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 to speed the fermentation of moneymaking \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcdevisas\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 of the brain to boost the economy. One wonders what Ben Jonson would have made of it.<\/p>\n
The \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccreative industries\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, according to the CBI, now account for more than 6% of Britain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s GDP \u00e2\u20ac\u201c just 3% behind the financial services sector \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and represent an inflatable life-raft in a floundering economy. Scoff if you like at Meedja Studies and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcMickey Mouse\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 courses, but there are number-crunchers at the Treasury who are seriously counting on Mickey and Minnie to save our island from disappearing off the global economic map. For a post-industrial nation that no longer makes things, creativity conjures the illusion of a deus ex machina materialising out blue skies thinking in a shower of gold. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no accident that the opening sentence of Alex Salmond\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Guide to an Independent Scotland hailed Caledonia as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153an ancient nation, renowned for the ingenuity and creativity of its people\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, or that Sir Sean Connery, in a New Statesman article hubristically headed \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThere is no more creative act than creating a nation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 [tell that to the Almighty, Mr Bond] argued that independence would present the Scots \u00e2\u20ac\u0153with an unparalleled opportunity to promote our creative excellence\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. In these days of corporate-creep, Hollywood and Holyrood speak the same language.<\/p>\n
Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get me wrong. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m as relieved to have escaped a haggisectomy as the next Sassenach, but when I hear the word \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccreativity\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 I reach for my revolver. Why? Because what was once a faculty free as the air we breathe has been thoroughly and comprehensively monetized. How did we let this happen? I date the start of the rot to the reign of John Birt, that Blairite Svengali of blue skies thinking and foggy speech who educated a generation of cultural administrators in the language of corporate creative bollocks. Take this example from Jana Bennett, former Head of Vision at the BBC, quoted in Private Eye\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcBirtspeak\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 column in 2007: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Now that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s clear the conversation genuinely can be a creative two-way process, and in many cases multi-way, we are witnessing the possibilities opened up when many ripples bump against one another and the patterns of interference, the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcmash-ups\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, they create. We have the opportunity more than ever before to willingly seed the clouds of creativity and see a creative rainfall.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Since Bennett\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s speech, the c-word count has risen. She notched up a modest four mentions; the Tate, in the publicity for its new IK Prize for \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcdigital creativity\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 unveiled in August, managed six.<\/p>\n
The clouds of creativity are clearly massing, thanks partly to the efforts of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccreativity enablers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 devising ways of optimising meteorological conditions through the establishment of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccreative hubs\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcincubator spaces\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcinnovation labs\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 in happening places. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153When you join THECUBE,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d coos the website of one such establishment in Shoreditch, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153you join a curated diverse and smart community of scientists, engineers, designers, technologists, artists, futurists and anthropologists\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Artists, one notes, are only fifth on the list \u00e2\u20ac\u201c ahead of Marinetti and L\u00c3\u00a9vi-Strauss \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but one assumes that all the disciplines share equally in the benefits of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153innovation through community\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. THECUBE\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s founders got the idea, their website says, in the aftermath of the financial crash, when they \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hypothesised that it was the start of an economic and anthropological pivot\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n
If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re wondering how exactly a pivot starts, THECUBE\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s engineers may be able to help. But let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not nitpick. Around a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153highly fuzzy concept\u00e2\u20ac\u009d like creativity, an occasional lack of clarity is inevitable. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no such problem in Africa, however, where of the 28 languages currently spoken only one \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Arabic \u00e2\u20ac\u201c has a word for \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccreative\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not that Africans are short on creativity, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just that in the matter of rainfall they prefer the wet kind that makes seeds grow into edible crops. Fuzzy concepts are luxuries for developed economies. In Taiwan, for example, they take their creative agronomy so seriously that last summer Taipei Contemporary Art Centre staged a Strategic Business Plan Public Stakeholders Consultation Focus Group Exhibition [snappy title] to show the products of three \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccreative game-based workshops\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 that \u00e2\u20ac\u02dclooked at aspects of the business of contemporary art\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. The workshops were run by visiting Senior Tutor in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College, Kit Hammonds, a specialist in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153imaginations of the future found in science, business planning and speculative fiction\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n
The line between art and business is now so fuzzy that an IBM Global CEO study of 2010 named creativity as the most crucial quality for leadership success (which could explain why so few CEOs are female, since women, as we know, are better at procreativity). How to reclaim creativity from business? By defending to the death our artistic right to exercise it in pursuit of the wildly irrational and unproductive. As Veronese, a champion of creativity avant la lettre, told the Inquisition: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We painters use the same licence as poets and madmen\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and he meant madmen, not ad men.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Laura Gascoigne investigates why what was once so very special is now common as muck and comprehensively commandeered by the fat controllers In The Masque of Augurs, Ben Jonson introduces the comic figure of Vangoose, a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153rare artist\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and producer of masques with a reputation for the wildly fantastical. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Now we would bring in some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[75],"class_list":["post-1527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","tag-laura-gascoigne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1527"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1530,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1527\/revisions\/1530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}