Nr 15 Kreativitet: PDF-version - Populär Poesi

Standing On The Crowd´s Shoulders
the social origin of creativity
We applaud Boudelaire for his Les Fleurs du Mal, we
revere Marx for Das Kapital and we admire Picasso for
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. All three are pieces of art
in their own right and each of them arouse strong
emotion of love or hate in many of us. We
exhaustively ponder the meaning of these works but
when it comes to the origin of the works we almost
always end up with unsatisfying statements of dates
and places. Das Kapital originated from the mind of
Marx in the 1860’s in London, Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon from the hand of Picasso in 1907, and the
original Les Fleurs du Mal from the pen of Baudelaire
during the 1840’s and 1850’s in Paris. This explanation
does not suffice in a study of the origin of these
works.
In the following article I will not refute that these
masterpieces stem from the minds of these
individuals, I will, however, assert that these minds
are not the source of these works. They are the fertile
ground in which the seed of creativity is planted. I will
assert that creativity, that lays at the base of bringing
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something ‘new’ into being, is not solely an individual
trait but is, for a large part, dependent on the
collective personal relations the ‘creator’ keeps.
Furthermore, I will show that ‘being creative’, or being
viewed as creative or innovative, largely depends on
one’s personal network for assessing something as
valuable and distributing this view amongst others.
Creativity in History
From the ancient Greeks to modern science; the
concept of creativity has always been a source of
interest throughout history. Antiquity had Plato, who
did not believe creativity existed, rather he believed
that art was a form of discovery. The only word the
Greeks had for creation was poiein (to make) and
poiesus (poetry) which only applied to that field.
Christians long believed that creativity was not an
individual asset but an expression of the divinity of
god, even reducing poetry to a ‘craft’. This view
remained unchallen ged until the renaissance and the
enlightenment thereafter. In this period creativity and