The Creativity Crisis

Another 'crisis' in the arts, this time creativity itself.

The article in Newsweek, The Creativity Crisis asserts that Americans have been becoming less creative.

Apparently, creativity quotients, or CQ have been declining since 1990, as measured by the Torrance Test.

But we have never been more creative--it's just that the ideas may be exhausted by too many options running in too many directions, or that people may have been instilled with idea that they have no talent or motivation to be creative.

Creativity may appear to be declining because there is no motivating reason for it, or that someone else does it, or is naturally suffused into everything we do. Creativity happens all around us without any participation on our part, like electricity or any seemingly continuous flow of resources.

It is also a bit ironic to use consider scores or quotients when measuring creativity. Scores redound from testing, and you can't accurately measure creativity, from testing. Creativity happens much more organically, and may be driven to a large degree by the cycles of history, or generational effects, which may partially explain the fall-off.

Why 1990 for the watershed?

I think the year is actually 1980 and it took 10 years for the effects to appear.

1980 was the beginning of the Reagan/Thatcher era. There may be many other factors, such as more doting parents (replacing authoritarian control of previous generations) MTV, CNN, the demise of the mom-and-pop to the big-box, the deracination of grass roots creativity to the commodified corporate variety, the end of Pink Floyd as we knew them, and so on.

In theory, Reagan ushered in a new zeitgeist that had been previously stymied by government regulation. Ideally, deregulation would have lifted the cap off of creativity, letting all the ideas run freely. In fact it did: 30 years later we can see the blowback of all that business 'creativity' manifested in the financial meltdown.

Republican administrations typically shift creative power to the business sector, with the idea that this spurs growth and innovation. But the opposite can happen, when the grass-roots variety of creativity is stanched by rigid policies and the control over the investment in innovation, rather than innovation itself.

This is not to say that Democratic administrations did not favor corporate interests over small businesses. Clinton was bullish on free trade, and NAFTA has not proven to be the panacea for growth as it was designed to be, and was blind to its negative effects. In any case, oppression from any direction is still oppressive.

Obama may now be in the position as Reagan had been in terms of a paradigm shift. But that is only a political phenomenon, and politics can be toxic to creativity. Creative objectives should ideally be apolitical (at least for the time that the creative process is taking place.) Disinterested control from outside the creative realm by corporations is anathema to creativity. We should encourage 'Skunk Works' in basements and garages, with people riffing on ideas, free from corporate control, at least in the divergent stage.

As a musician, I realize creative capital arises from the synergy of the interpersonal and the zeitgeist of the moment. The Beatles still exemplify this fabric of events in which art, history, culture, technology and business (and the spiritual) converge like a syzygy of planets, culminating in a very rare event. When one of the factors are missing or out of order, it can be difficult to recreate events of this magnitude. Will the electric car take off like the Beatles? The power of the moment scaled up nicely for the music industry, but can that recipe be repeated in other industries?


Did we deplete our creative energy 1980-1990?

Deregulation makes creativity in business run in a divergent fashion from the bottom up with unbounded pressure: economies overheat and bubbles begin to inflate. The assumption is that with less control you would see more creativity, but the extreme flow of options can paralyze the creative process. As Salvador Dali once expressed, "The worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity." The current crisis may have more to do with the over-abundance of ideas with little limitation.

The 'crisis' may only be a natural condition. Perhaps things aren't properly aligned or sequenced for optimal creativity. It will happen in its own time with patience.

In photography, sometimes to get he shot you want you have to sit and wait for it to move into position. But it is also valid to be in motion to take advantage of chance occurrence. The Beatles may have been doing both at the same time.