The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History

In fact the creative person was by definition one who put their open-mindedness to work. “The creative individual not only respects the irrational in himself,” Barron explained, “but courts it as the most promising source of novelty in his own thought.”42 The creative person, he wrote, is one who solves “problems external to himself” and “creates h

We work gigs (the artsy phrase is not a coincidence), and even though a lot of work seems as rote and pointless as ever, we try hard to follow the instructions Steve Jobs bestowed upon the Stanford graduating class of 2005: “do what you love.”

The fact that they appealed to would-be employees not by highlighting pay, benefits, or esprit de corps, but by emphasizing the opportunity to be creative (in its multiple senses), attests to the challenge of legitimacy the profession was beginning to face along the way. Due to overlapping concerns about white-collar alienation, militarism, and the

In the creative act, Maslow wrote, we become “free of other people, which in turn, means that we become much more ourselves, our Real Selves.” This authentic self was not the social self that dominated interwar thought but the absolutely autonomous self, free of any entanglements or obligations. Like a modern-day Rousseau, Maslow celebrated the chi

The notion of creativity allowed people to interpret career and lifestyle preferences as expressions of innate personality traits rather than as exercises in class distinction; to imagine a direct link between personal and economic growth. It allows us to see late capitalism as a natural consequence of human beings striving to express themselves as

Yes, institutional calcification is a real phenomenon, and leaders who come from outside and aren’t afraid to shake things up can be incredibly generative (as long as “shaking things up” isn’t just a euphemism for privatizing, downsizing, etc.). But when the whole business of “changing the world” reflexively demeans career experts and specialists a

This was one of the ways in which class, gender, race, and the conditions of labor were naturalized and universalized as innate personality traits, and creativity subtly transformed from an effect (an accomplishment or a behavior) into a cause (a psychological state).

as fun as the process may be, it must always come back to someone else’s bottom line, the session must always end.

Postwar champions of creativity smashed productivity and personal growth together, with professional success serving as the proof of, and means to, a fully realized self.