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A brief history of creativity (and power)
When we look at the evolution of creativity, one story that can be told is that it was a concept designed to extricate divine procreative power from women and give it to men.
Elan Ullendorff • A brief history of creativity (and power)
When I hear artists and AI evangelists argue about whether people who generate text using ChatGPT or images using Midjourney are truly creative, I wonder about the question behind the question.
Elan Ullendorff • A brief history of creativity (and power)
Aristotle took this counterfactual account one step further by elevating it to the level of science, claiming that semen is the primary creator of life, and that the woman's body is only material for the semen to work with.
Elan Ullendorff • A brief history of creativity (and power)
When we look at the evolution of creativity, one story that can be told is that it was a concept designed to extricate divine procreative power from women and give it to men.
There are other stories to tell as well. In the twentieth century, creativity became enmeshed with capitalistic productivity, and its study was largely centered around the fiel... See more
There are other stories to tell as well. In the twentieth century, creativity became enmeshed with capitalistic productivity, and its study was largely centered around the fiel... See more
Elan Ullendorff • A brief history of creativity (and power)
Science may be the pursuit of truth, but scientific language is adept at dressing up insidious ideologies as fundamental truths.
Elan Ullendorff • A brief history of creativity (and power)
Historian Gerda Lerner says that this marks a "counterfactual account of the origin of human life" in which man is literally the woman's mother.
Elan Ullendorff • A brief history of creativity (and power)
When we look at the evolution of creativity, one story that can be told is that it was a concept designed to extricate divine procreative power from women and give it to men.
There are other stories to tell as well. In the twentieth century, creativity became enmeshed with capitalistic productivity, and its study was largely centered around the fiel... See more
There are other stories to tell as well. In the twentieth century, creativity became enmeshed with capitalistic productivity, and its study was largely centered around the fiel... See more
Elan Ullendorff • A brief history of creativity (and power)
How we get from a goddess creating through birth to the (typically male) creative entrepreneurs on the covers of magazines is mainly a story about power. Slowly but surely, male gods climbed the creative ladder, first assisting goddesses in procreation, but eventually overtaking them, as people sought out forms of religious worship that more closel... See more
Elan Ullendorff • A brief history of creativity (and power)
It is not until Christian theology that gods began creating from nothing ( ex nihilo ), rather from existing materials: "Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made" (John 1:3). During the Renaissance, this doctrine of ex nihilo was applied to people—specifically, artists.