What kind of creativity do we need to cultivate as we step into the second decade of the 21st century?
Can artistic expression help us become conscious creators?
Creativity is on everyone lips and seams to be wanted everywhere, at school, at work and at home, as if creativity could be the answer to the drastic changes and challenges our society is facing. However looking at the amount of goods, products, technologies and infrastructures we have created over the last century, I am doubting our lack of creativity. Faced with the ecological and capitalistic crisis of this last decade shouldn’t we rather become aware of the dangers of our gift of creativity when essentially used at the service of productivity and marketing?
As the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze already prompted in 1995, “we are faced now with fundamental questions about what may or may not be meant by ‘creativity’. Information technology, communications and advertising are taking over the words ‘concept’ and ‘creative,’ revealing the activity of selling to be capitalism’s supreme thought.”
There is often some confusion between creativity and artistic skills. Creativity, our capacity to create something new, can be applied to all fields or utilitarian purposes and doesn’t require any artistic skills. Artistic expression activates both our creativity and imagination in ways that often engage our sensorial, emotional, intellectual and spiritual responses for no direct utilitarian purpose. Creativity is always closely related to imagination. Imagination is the conductor or spark that sets in motion any creative action. Our tremendous capacity for individual and collective imagination is probably what most differentiates us humans from our relatives from the animal world.
As Yuval Noah Harari describes in his book “Sapiens: A brief history of humankind 2011: “Seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in humans’ collective imagination.” What makes us sapiens so special among the rest of the living world is in fact our amazing gift of creativity and imagination; sadly we are now realising that it might also be our curse. Why are we inhabited by such tremendous need to create, a need that has become almost neurotic or at least unconsciously self-destructive?
