Define Creative

            So, here’s an interesting question: which artform is more creative – writing or acting? Painting or architecture? Dance or musical performance? Physics or math?

            Whoa, stop! Physics? MATH?!? What do those have to do with art? Actually, a lot more than you’ve been taught to believe. Science requires (from its best practitioners) an amazing range of creativity and intuition. Einstein is famously quoted as saying, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” He arrived at some of his most important theories through imagination, and only set about to apply logic later. Even Newton, who created physics by insisting that every observable consequence of mechanics followed simple mathematical laws, utilized his imagination constantly. His greatest contribution to math, the calculus, requires the use of ‘vanishingly small changes’ in the equations he was trying to solve, endlessly piled on top of one another. If that doesn’t smell of imagination, what does? Sure, it also requires some very clever mathematics to make it work – but again, after the fact. Is calculus worthwhile? Consider that none of our bridges and damn few of our buildings would stand up without it. Imagination holds up and gives structure to your world.

            Pure mathematicians – the guys and gals who create new forms of math just for the sake of the math – almost universally consider their work to be an art form. And why wouldn’t they? They are constantly in search of ‘the most beautiful’ theories and formulas. Sounds like an art, doesn’t it? They’re also very often dismayed when one of their ‘beautiful’ results is commandeered by engineers and technologists to solve real world problems. Art is very often useful as well as beautiful. Sculptors create automobiles. Writers set political agendas. Scientists are often musicians as well. Actors run for public office. So, tell me why are the STEM disciplines the only creative endeavors worth teaching and subsidizing? Visual arts, music, theatre and dance are just as important to our modern world as mathematics, science and engineering. Engineering may give us the latest cell phone, but art is what we do with it.

            So, if you can – define ‘creative’. What does it mean? What is it good for? Is there only one truly useful form of creativity? Two? A dozen, a thousand? And who gets to decide that this art form is useful, but this other is not? Is it the job of artists to decide this? Politicians? Business owners? Accountants? A number of years ago, BBC Science Correspondent James Burke created a book and a TV series titled Connections. His thesis was that progress in the sciences and technology is not nearly as linear as most people believe. Sometimes you find what you’re looking for, sometimes you look for one thing and find something else, sometimes it just seems to drop out of the sky, and so on. I would consider that a good summary of the way creativity works. Unfortunately, Burke’s position was that art, theatre and literature is nice and all, but doesn’t really move humanity forward. There, I think he’s dead wrong. There is good reason to believe that the invention of gunpowder was very important to the human race, but I don’t agree that it’s more important than the development of two-point perspective in painting.

            Some theorists and psychologists would like to say that creativity is simply the process of finding a solution, a working-out of the differences between two disparate but overlapping fields of human endeavor. I would agree that creativity can use those overlaps to find solutions, but that is not the only driving mechanism. Sometimes answers come when you’re looking in one direction, only to come randomly popping out in another. It seems to me that those who would like to define creativity as a complex working of a societal impulse or an evolutionary process in the brain are similar to those who want to explain away genius as simply a learned behavior, raised to a high efficiency. That is not at all what it is, and simply points up the fact that these experts simply don’t understand creativity or genius because they are neither. Not everyone is creative – you were lied to, get over it. Anyone can learn to use creative thinking and creative techniques to come up with non-standard answers, and I think they should. But true creatives have been that way for as long as they can remember, usually. Some (maybe even most) tend to get squashed by the modern educational system, and a few of those can re-discover their talents at a later date. Some never do. This is one of the great crimes and tragedies of our modern world. We need creatives to do what they do best.

            If I had to define creativity, I would say it’s a way of seeing, thinking, feeling and acting which tends to find solutions to problems or put forward new ways of thinking and seeing which have value for the community at large. Painting, in its best form, is not merely decorative, any more than engineering at its best simply provides more goods and services for sale. Business is not the sole form of useful human endeavor – thank goodness. And finally, there can never be a legitimate final arbiter as to the usefulness or importance of any particular art form or individual work of art. Every true work is the child of the creator’s soul, every work finds its truest audience. The popularity of any given piece of work is no indication of its importance.

            Economist Richard Florida put forward the idea of ‘the Creative Class’ a few years ago. His thesis was that those who can create new content, new ideas and solve important problems are going to drive the economy of the future, post-industrial era. His theories have been controversial and have moved in and out of favor. To some extent, I believe he’s right – creatives will be the movers and shakers for the foreseeable future, but we must be cautious. We can create any number of wonderful worlds in our imaginations, but not all of them are good for all or even for most people. We all tend to favor people like ourselves, but we must not leave the rest of the world out in the cold. The takeover of the world by the creatives must be as egalitarian and bloodless as we can manage. Long live the artists and inventors! Vive la Revolution!

TGC