How Creativity Became the Reigning Value of Our Time
April 21, 2025 at 09:50PMDuring the past century, “creativity” evolved from a mess of privately held notions to a cultural panacea. Beginning in the 1950s, some psychologists interviewed and tested prominent intellectuals, including the architect I.M. Pei and the writer Truman Capote, to better understand the creative individual. Others developed novel tests to quantify “divergent thinking”; in one, an individual was provided a common object, like a brick, and given a limited time in which to identify as many inventive uses for it as possible. Some of these tests still form (and malform) our ideas of creativity–a seemingly “unimpeachable value that no one, regardless of what side of the political spectrum they fell on, would even think to question,” says Samuel Franklin, a cultural historian and author of The Cult of Creativity. Fresh from a trip to A Minecraft Movie with my kids, I appreciated this exchange between Franklin and Bryan Gardiner for the MIT Technology Review, which complicates easy, individualist notions of creativity with a few “boring-but-important things”–among them, morality and craft.
Like a lot of kids, I grew up thinking that creativity was this inherently good thing. For me—and I imagine for a lot of other people who, like me, weren’t particularly athletic or good at math and science—being creative meant you at least had some future in this world, even if it wasn’t clear what that future would entail. By the time I got into college and beyond, the conventional wisdom among the TED Talk register of thinkers—people like Daniel Pink and Richard Florida—was that creativity was actually the most important trait to have for the future. Basically, the creative people were going to inherit the Earth, and society desperately needed them if we were going to solve all of these compounding problems in the world.
On the one hand, as someone who liked to think of himself as creative, it was hard not to be flattered by this. On the other hand, it all seemed overhyped to me. What was being sold as the triumph of the creative class wasn’t actually resulting in a more inclusive or creative world order. What’s more, some of the values embedded in what I call the cult of creativity seemed increasingly problematic—specifically, the focus on self-realization, doing what you love, and following your passion. Don’t get me wrong—it’s a beautiful vision, and I saw it work out for some people. But I also started to feel like it was just a cover for what was, economically speaking, a pretty bad turn of events for many people.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/21/how-creativity-became-the-reigning-value-of-our-time/
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