Depths of Imagination: A Review of “The Cult of Creativity—A Surprisingly Recent History” by Samuel E. Franklin

Perhaps you consider yourself to be a person possessed of that glittering quality known as “creativity.” And who could blame you? We valorize it, seek it out, reward it, cultivate it, admire it, encourage it in children, and spend money on it. But what, exactly, is creativity, and how did it come to assume such a place of privilege in the pantheon of desirable human traits? You could brainstorm answers to those questions, of course, but I have a better idea: read “The Cult of Creativity—A Surprisingly Recent History,” a compelling new book by cultural historian Samuel Franklin. True to the book’s subtitle, you likely will be surprised to learn that as a supposed unitary facet of human personality, creativity is a relatively recent concept. Painters, poets, composers, choreographers and other artists have been plumbing the depths of imagination for a long time. But Franklin explains how the mid-twentieth century’s pursuit of an appealing and mysterious psychological construct brought creativity down from the artist’s lofty garret and into corporate boardrooms, training seminars, classrooms, bookstores, innovation labs, and the practical, everyday world of ordinary people.  Simply put, a psychological construct is a statistically cohesive constellation of traits, dispositions, abilities, and behaviors all bundled into one lumpy, theoretical package and stamped by psychologists with a label like Empathy, Self-Esteem or Intelligence. Creativity is one such package assembled mostly over the last seventy-five years by a collection of researchers, psychologists, self-help gurus, and business, advertising and media executives.  Goosed by Cold War imperatives and research dollars, creativity rocketed into popular consciousness in the 1950s and 1960s. Creativity, it was believed, would motor the postwar economy and foster technological and military superiority over the Soviet Union. Techniques like brainstorming were developed and popularized as a way to spark organizational creativity. Humanistic psychologists posited creativity as a pathway for self-actualization. Exploring one’s creative side in whatever form that might take became a way to maintain mental health and add balance to the demands of modern living.  Creativity offered a powerful, subjective anchor for capitalism’s most important resource—freethinking individuals with the creative license to pursue an idea and bring it to market. No longer limited to a handful of artsy-fartsy creative geniuses, creativity became a symbol for democratic egalitarianism and meritocratic opportunity, as anyone from rocket scientists to housewives, sales executives, auto mechanics, grocery store clerks, and four-year olds could theoretically possess it and leverage it for gain.

But why a “cult”? As Franklin notes, isolating this thing we call creativity helped to psychologize the capitalist imperative to innovate, to create and valorize the new even when the old is working perfectly fine, all in the interest of loosening a consumer’s hold on their wallet. Like other theoretical concepts ostensibly grounded in human psychology, the construction of creativity unfolded in social, political and economic contexts that were cloaked in the objectivating language of science. We have since come to think of creativity as an unproblematic, desirable “real” thing, forgetting that the meanings we assign to it have been socially conditioned and may serve ideological and economic interests other than our own. In other words, the lavish attention paid (and I mean paid) to creativity reflects a monetization of a real human need for novelty in a way that benefits humanity less than we think and corporate and political interests more than we know. (Ponder that, TikTokers.) What Franklin leaves us with is a thought-provoking reevaluation of a celebrated societal value marbled with contradictions. All told, “The Cult of Creativity” is lucid, fresh and illuminating. If you need more adjectives than that, you’ll have to brainstorm them yourself.

“The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History”
By Samuel E. Franklin
University of Chicago Press, 264 pages