Cultural Work

The idea of ‘creativity’ is at once both discredited and extraordinarily fashionable. How could that be? Why such a paradox? It is discredited because the very notion of creativity was once held to be a special attribute, something unusual and rare, confined to only a select few — in origin, God-given. It is unfashionable now because overt elitism (but perhaps not covert elitism) has been outlawed in an illusory culture of democracy. Yet, at the same time, it is a conventional wisdom to say that we are all creative now. That meets the bill of routine populism and, indeed, a banal existentialism that has become pervasive in everyday life, and increasingly so at work. Everyone is creative, so nobody is excluded. However, it also seems that some are more creative than others. ‘Creativity’ is held to be a good thing, so we should all try to achieve it. Faced with such equality of opportunity, some unfortunately fall short and, in consequence, must pay the penalty for their abject inertia, especially in business. Along the way, creativity loses all specificity. It is such a good thing that we can hardly say what it is. It used to be associated most strongly with art, imagination and inspiration. Such associations are too elitist today. People who would not normally be counted as artists are said to be creative too.1 And, since entrepreneurial business is the stuff of life, surely enterprising individuals must be creative as well.