Creative writing 4

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2 The Creator as Genius

Robert Albert and Mark Runco, when investigating the history and research into creativity, assert that:

By the end of the eighteenth century, it was concluded that whereas many persons may have talent of one sort or another and that this talent would be responsive to education, original genius was truly exceptional and by definition was to be exempt from the rules, customs and obligations that applied to the talented. (Sternberg 1999, p. 21)

Robert Weisberg concurs stating that:

the literature on creativity was until recently dominated by what one could call the ‘genius’ view of creativity, which also pervades our society. This view, which has many sources, ranging from Plato to Koestler to Osborn to psychometric theorists such as Guildford, assumes that truly creative acts involve extraordinary individuals carrying out extraordinary thought processes. These individuals are called geniuses, and the psychological characteristics they possess – cognitive and personality characteristics – make up what is called genius. (Sternberg 1999, p. 148)

This idea of genius is underpinned by two widespread views of cre- ativity still in common use in the West. One of these is labelled the inspirationist view while the other has been labelled the Romantic view (Boden 2004, p. 14). Many times there is such a deeply held belief in these views that a reasoned investigation of creativity appears to be not only wrong-headed but almost sacrilegious. Margaret Boden, for one,

McIntyre, P.. Creativity and Cultural Production : Issues for Media Practice, Palgrave Macmillan Limited, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/michstate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=815882. Created from michstate-ebooks on 2018-07-25 07:19:01.

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The Creator as Genius 13

contends that ‘these views are believed by many to be literally true. But they are rarely critically examined. They are not theories, so much as myths: imaginative constructions’ (ibid.).

If this is the case, where did they come from? To answer that ques- tion we need to firstly cast our minds back to the world of the Greeks. Plato, writing about inspiration in the fourth century BC, set the stage for what became a persistent belief in a complex relationship of cre- ativity with the supernatural or the divine. He himself believed that inspiration came from beyond the individual and did so usually when that individual was out of their senses or working beyond reason. Not- ing that Greeks believed poetry to be one of the highest forms of human expression, Plato stated in his ‘Dialogue with Ion’ that the muse was the lodestone all poets were searching for and the source of inspiration they had to be intimately connected to:

She first makes men inspired, and then through these inspired ones others share in the enthusiasm, and a chain is formed, for the epic poets, all the good ones, have their excellence, not from art, but are inspired, possessed, and thus they utter all these admirable poems . . . . A poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to com- pose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him. So long as he has this in his possession, no man is able to make poetry or to chant in prophecy . . . these lovely poems are not of man or human workmanship, but are divine and from the gods, and that poets are nothing but interpreters of the gods, each one possessed by the divinity to whom he is in bondage. (Plato 1971, p. 220)

This inspirationist view, that a creator must be undisciplined and almost mad while waiting to be divinely inspired, is still with us today. From this inspirationist perspective, it must be the extraordinary being with extraordinary gifts who is more likely to have access to the muse and thus to creativity. It is from this narrative that the genius model arises.

If one traces the etymology of the word ‘genius’, it can be seen that it shifted meaning over a number of centuries, from being a literal term derived from Latin for the spirits that inhabit people and places, to become a description of a spirit, similar to the muse, that influences a person in both good and evil ways, to then becoming a term for a per- son endowed with a particular spirit or power, most often thought to be exceptional intellectual or creative powers (OED 2010). This latter power is ascribed to individuals ‘who are esteemed greatest in any department’

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14 Theories about Creativity and Cultural Production

(ibid.). It is little wonder then that genius figures are associated with God-given or spirit-like talents evident in the work they produce and the lives they lead. Despite all the arguments and evidence to the contrary, this perception appears to still be embedded in Western common-sense belief systems.

One of the dominant discourses in the West is that of the Judeo- Christian tradition. One of the fundamental tenets of this belief system is that the world was bought into being from non-existence. There are not too many in the West who are not familiar with the story that starts, ‘in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth . . . ’. This story is fundamental to centuries of understanding. It recognises the possibil- ity of all things being able to be made or created from non-existence. Once the notion of genius can be seen as analogous to that of the cre- ator myth, then it also becomes acceptable that creativity itself can be conceived of as a spiritual and mystical process directly connected to extraordinary individuals with god-like powers. These individuals have, for a number of largely unknowable reasons, access to that process. Since God also ‘created man in his image’ it is a small enough step to take, and then accept, that a few rare individuals working under divine inspiration can create astounding objects, ideas and concepts that have their genesis in a realm beyond mere mortals.

However, for Immanuel Kant (1982), whose name has become inex- tricably tied to the field of aesthetics and thus for our purposes to the notion of genius, there is a disconnection with the biblical or Platonic idea that the source of a creator’s genius comes from a divine external source. He instead insisted that the locus of creativity could be found internally, in:

a unique and spontaneous act that introduces a leap in ordinary natu- ral processes . . . the creator gives the rule to his work; he generates his style and the significance of the product in accordance with his freely functioning imagination. [Furthermore] creation of art is not only independent of prior procedures or rules, but it is independent of all conditions other than spontaneous activity made possible through faculties in the creator’s consciousness. (Rothenberg & Housman 1976, p. 29)

This move away from creativity being driven by an external force working on the individual, such as a muse, a tutelary spirit or indeed the Christian God, towards an emphasis on the unknowable internal landscape of the creator was a powerful one.

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By the 1700s there was a growing rejection in some circles of ratio- nalism and a move towards the idea that intuition and emotion may be the best way into a ‘real’ experience of the world, and according to Peter Watson (2005), the West is still living with the ramifications of this rejec- tion. For him ‘the rival ways of looking at the world – the cool, detached light of disinterested scientific reason, and the red-blooded, passion- ate creations of the artist – constitute the modern incoherence’ (2005, p. 610). Elizabeth Paton summarises much of this strong intellectual tradition, which valorised the passionate above the rational, in her own research into creativity and fiction writing. She suggests that a number of philosophers vital to Romanticism, including Kant, Rousseau, Goethe and Schiller, ‘proposed a return to nature and authenticity and a reliance on feelings, instinct and subjective thought . . . [but] the Romantic move- ment did not explicitly oppose rationality’ (2008, p. 23). She cites the examples of Coleridge who, in his Biographia Literaria, incorporated ele- ments of empiricism and foreshadowed the work of Freud. However, Paton notes that ‘despite the inherent complexities of the Roman- tic movement, a distinction between reason and instinct/intuition has persisted’ (2008, p. 24).

In pushing reason aside with the idea that ‘creativity bubbles up from an irrational unconscious, and that rational deliberation interferes with the creative process’ (Sawyer 2006, p. 15), the emphasis shifted from discovering the truth of experience rationally towards thinking that individual artists were motivated by an ‘inner muse that was beyond conscious control’ (ibid., p. 16). For the nineteenth-century Romantics in particular, who did not want to be shackled to the de-humanising and apparently deterministic world they saw in the increasingly indus- trialised world around them, the desire for self-determination had given way to self-expression and self-discovery, leaving the individual at the heart of the creative process. The question then arose for them as to what makes one individual different from the other in terms of creative capability. What, in essence, marked artists off as special? Since many Romantics distanced themselves from a society they perceived to be util- itarian and philistine, it was this very distancing and ensuing isolation ‘that served to fuel ideas of split personality and opposing selves, an allusion to popular notions of artistic creativity as intrinsically linked to pain, suffering and madness’ (Petrie 1991, p. 3):

The notion of creativity driven by feelings and intuition was main- tained in later forms of Romanticism, drawing on the lives and works of earlier artists who came to represent stereotypes of artistic genius.

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16 Theories about Creativity and Cultural Production

Commemorated in work by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Rossetti, the English poet Thomas Chatterton became a symbol of the suffering of misunderstood genius after his suicide in 1770; a related stereotype of highly sensitive and passionate genius was influ- enced by Goethe’s ([1774] 1990) fictional hero Werther who relied on pure feeling but was also driven to suicide; although disdain- ful of many of the central tenets of Romanticism, Byron embodied another aspect of the stereotypical Romantic genius, that of the social deviant permitted to live and act outside the realm of accepted social behaviour because of his artistic contributions. (Paton 2008, p. 24)

From the Romantic point of view, ‘it is the artist who creates, who expresses himself, who creates values. The artist does not discover, cal- culate, deduce, as the scientist (or philosopher) does. In creating, the artist invents his goal and then realises his own path toward that goal’ (Watson 2005, p. 609). For the Romantic artist, as Margaret Boden sug- gests, ‘intuitive talent is innate, a gift that can be squandered but cannot be acquired – or taught’ (2004, p. 15). However, she believes that this way of seeing creativity is defeatist as it implies that ‘the most we can do to encourage creativity is to identify the people with this special tal- ent, and give them room to work. Any more active fostering of creativity is inconceivable’ (ibid.).

Both positions, the inspirationist and the Romantic, have led to the stereotypical view of the quasi-neurotic artist existing in their garret waiting for the muse to arrive or inspiration to strike (Zolberg 1990, pp. 109–10). However, this is a conception of a creative person, and from there, creative activity, that is difficult to sustain when one exam- ines in detail the lives of those our own particular social and cultural grouping considered to be exceptionally creative. This examination has been carried out a number of times but is best exemplified in the work of Howard Gardner, as set out in his book Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham and Gandhi (1993). While Gardner’s, and many others’ (e.g. Howe 1999), ideas have moved much closer to seeing creativity emanating from a multifactorial process, the general acceptance of the inspirational and Romantic view led, in part, to scientific work during the nineteenth century which concentrated on the question of what made the creative individual different to other individuals. Explanations were pursued to reveal the character of the phenomenon of genius with an assumed belief that since genius was extraordinary the next logical place to look for it would be in deviant behaviour and, of course, the

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most deviant form of behaviour was insanity. Cesare Lombroso (1891) was a central figure in this process.

Lombroso, a psychiatrist and Professor of Legal Medicine at the University of Turin writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, approached his research on genius utilising the biological theories in vogue at the time. He believed that the physical degeneration of the brain was the cause of abnormal functioning in the individual. Since by definition genius was certainly ‘abnormal’, then logically the two, genius and insanity, must be connected. Lombroso then set about docu- menting the abnormal behaviour of ‘men of genius’. He argued there was a ‘resemblance between insanity and genius’ (1984, p. 66) and thus one could conclude that the thought processes of genius were not rational but generally instinctive and unconscious. Despite the dubi- ousness of some of these claims the link between deviance, insanity and creativity was thought to be established.

This idea was not lost on Sigmund Freud. In his paper ‘Creative Writ- ers and Day-Dreaming’ (Freud in Strachey 1953, p. 75), Freud attempted to explain what gifted individuals do in terms of quasi-neuroses. He pro- posed that writers, and by implication all creators, were like children at play. He argued that the creative writer:

creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously – that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion – while separat- ing it sharply from reality. Language has preserved this relationship between children’s play and poetic creation. It designates certain kinds of imaginative creation concerned with tangible objects and capable of representation. As ‘plays’; the people who present them are called players. (Freud quoted in Rothenberg & Hausman 1976, p. 49)

He adds that ‘every child at play behaves like a creative writer. In that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him’ (ibid.). Freud claimed that this activity on the part of the creative writer is driven by wish fulfilment. According to Arthur Berger, Freud argued that in many creative productions ‘the original daydream that generated the story is greatly disguised’ (1995, p. 159). However, in the end, ‘the creative production can be traced back to some strong experience, usually had in childhood, that generated a wish that eventually is fulfilled in the creative work’ (ibid.). In essence, the ‘Freudian tradition in psychology sees the artist driven by uncon- scious motivations – a quasi-neurotic who channels his near-pathology into a socially permissible path’ (Zolberg 1990, pp. 109–10).

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18 Theories about Creativity and Cultural Production

Duncan Petrie however calls Freud’s explanation for creativity into question and argues that Freud was working under the sway of the Romantic ideal. In regarding the artist as a neurotic:

Freud was merely adopting a popular belief of his age – an expression of industrial rationalisation and bourgeois philistinism. In relating the creative powers of the artist to neurosis, Freud is effectively pro- viding what amounts to a medicalised re-reading of the Romantic agony. (Petrie 1991, p. 5)

Petrie further argues that Freud can be criticised for thinking of art as existing only in its relation to ‘the individual who produced or contem- plated a particular work. The objective role of social conditions and the process of production itself are practically ignored’ (Petrie 1991, p. 5). Furthermore, since the Freudian view suggests that ‘creative individuals are inclined (or compelled) to sublimate much of their libidinal energy’ (Gardner 1993, p. 24) to creative activity, and since it is assumed that this activity is an unconscious process, it can be asserted that the indi- viduals involved do so with little intention. However, as will be argued later, this position strips them of their freedom to make artistic choices, that is, it strips them of their creative agency. It also leaves little room for distinguishing the ‘effective artist or scientist from the ineffective or banal one’ (Gardner 1993, p. 25).

In attempting to resolve this problem Robert Weisberg argues that there is no distinction to be made between the thought processes of ordinary individuals and that of the extra-ordinary figures who make startling and unusual leaps in creativity. In his book Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius (1993), Weisberg set out four areas of creative thought that, to his mind, explain the similarities rather than the distinctions. Firstly, Weisberg argued that all ‘attempts to solve problems are based on past experience’ (Weisberg 1993, pp. 152–3). People engaged in creative activity initiate work on problems by matching the problem to their knowledge base and solutions come about in an evolutionary way not a revolutionary way. Secondly, he asserts the process ‘based on local mem- ory search is set in motion by feedback concerning the inadequacy of some proposed solution’ (ibid.). Thirdly, the new information brought into existence alters the arena in which the problem now occurs, and this new information presents the possible new solution. Finally, he goes on to say that if solutions to problems are ‘creative’ because ‘they are novel and they meet the demands of the problem, then the capac- ity to think creatively must be a basic human capacity, and not the

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exotic trait or skill envisioned by the “genius” view’ (Weisberg 1993, pp. 152–3).

Using these four steps as a guide Weisberg then explores in some detail the work of a few noted ‘genius’ figures. He examines Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double helix model of DNA which set off a revolution in molecular biology, Darwin’s theory of evolution, Edison’s inven- tion of the kinetoscope and Picasso’s painting of Guernica. Through an appraisal of these selected examples he presents documentary evi- dence of the thought processes of these noted creators. He contends that while these discoveries and works were highly important for their fields, in all these cases ‘one sees nothing like the creative leaps postulated by the genius view’ (Weisberg 1993, p. 168). Instead novel products, be they paintings, scientific theories or inventions, started out as sim- ple extensions of what had preceded them. ‘The initial conception then underwent modification, until something new emerged’ (ibid.). Weisberg sees the idea of the flash of genius, the leap of creative insight, the lightning bolt of divine inspiration as nothing more than a slowly evolving and incremental cognitive process, only recognised at the moment of illumination. Strokes of genius ‘are firmly embedded within an extended process of becoming one with and synthesising from exist- ing elements’ (Negus and Pickering 2004, p. 158). Consequently, if only the illumination aspect of creativity is consciously recognised, then it would seem appropriate to explain creativity in terms of this alone. But once creativity is seen as an evolving process involving a complex set of factors, then it would seem that remarkable insights are within the grasp of all given the right circumstances.

In many ways, Weisberg’s ideas accord with the neo-Darwinian view of creativity presented by Dean Keith Simonton (Brockman 1993). Simonton also attempts to explode the view of the mythic genius figure. He argues that ideas, concepts, memories, feelings and so on are subject to the same sorts of permutations and variations that occur in biology in genetic mutations. These permutations or variations happen haphaz- ardly and the ‘blind variations are then subject to a consistent selection process which eliminates those ideas, thoughts and so on that lack adap- tive fitness’ (Simonton in Brockman 1993, p. 178). Simonton suggests that, ‘there must exist within the creator’s mind some stable criteria by which to winnow out the true, beautiful, or useful variations from those that are false, ugly or impractical’ (ibid.). Here they make judge- ments drawing on pre-existing sets of social and cultural knowledges. Once judgements have been made the variations have to be preserved and reproduced, that is, they have to be retained. Therefore, there is a

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two-step process that occurs in creative thinking. Firstly, blind variation produces the possible permutations and, secondly, selective retention chooses and stores the information. Simonton cites cases of highly cre- ative individuals ruminating, pondering and worrying at problems for extended periods and suggests that in this rumination there is not one dominant style of thinking taking place. According to Simonton it is freely associational since, in order to produce as many variations as pos- sible, creative cogitation must encompass a significant range of thought processes. This process not only occurs internally, that is, within the mind of the creator, but once an object or idea is manifest in the world it too follows the same evolutionary process. All of the papers, prod- ucts, ideas and artworks that are produced are selected by ‘appreciators, audiences, patrons, or colleagues’ (Simonton in Brockman 1993, p. 184). Some works will convince this field of their worth and others will sim- ply fail in this endeavour. It follows, argues Simonton, that a creative individual must be prolific in order to merit ‘genius’ status, since one exceptional feature that marks a genius ‘is there astonishing productiv- ity’ (Brockman 1993, p. 185). This productivity not only increases the chances of their work being selected but it also increases the fallibility of these genius figures and thus rehumanises them in their willingness to make mistakes (Negus & Pickering 2004, p. 159). They do so many times in the trial-and-error process which produces the one idea that will lead to exceptional creativity or, using the older conception, gain them the status of ‘genius’.

What these arguments tend to indicate is that there may not be as rad- ical a disjuncture between what ordinary people do and the supposed extraordinary powers of the astonishing genius. This assertion con- firms Margaret Boden’s characterisation of H-creativity, that is, creativity deemed to be historically important, as an extension of P-creativity, the type that ordinary people personally engage in. Nonetheless, if we pursue for a moment the idea that the experience of genius may be qualitatively different from other forms of creativity, an examination of where an assumption of the veracity of this idea has led will expose the supposed connection between, for example, intelligence and the notion of genius. Pursuing this idea will then lead us to another. That is, above- average intellectual ability is thought to be a significant distinguishing factor between P-creativity and H-creativity or personal creativity and paradigm shifting creativity. If this is the case, then one would expect that there would be a direct correlation between high intelligence and ‘genius’. But this assertion doesn’t appear to be the case.

The problem with linking high intelligence and so-called ‘genius’ can be exemplified by investigating an organisation like MENSA. MENSA, a

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club for highly intelligent people, was founded in England in 1946 with ‘the idea of forming a society for bright people’ (MENSA 2010). The only qualification for membership is to have an IQ in the top 2 per cent of the population. MENSA has around 110,000 members in 100 countries throughout the world, and there are active MENSA organisations in over 40 countries on every continent except Antarctica. One would expect to see in an organisation such as this a high proportion of what have been termed genius figures. However, there is simply no one prevailing characteristic among these members:

The range is staggering. Mensa has professors and truck drivers, sci- entists and firefighters, computer programmers and farmers, artists, military people, musicians, laborers, police officers, glassblowers – the diverse list goes on and on. There are famous Mensans and prize- winning Mensans, but there are many whose names you wouldn’t know. (MENSA 2010)

If an organisation like this can’t boast a significant number of genii on its roster, then it would seem that the direct correlation made between genius and intelligence may be somewhat tenuous. However, the idea that high intelligence and genius are linked can also be problematised by investigating the notion of intelligence itself. Intelligence, accord- ing to Haralambos and Holbern, has been defined as ‘abstract reasoning ability’ and it is argued that it is ‘a selection of just one portion of the total spectrum of human mental abilities’ (1995, p. 746). They go on to state that it is ‘the ability to discover the rules, patterns, and logi- cal principles underlying objects and events, and the ability to apply these discoveries to solve problems’ (ibid.). They also point out that IQ tests, of the type initially proposed by Binet in the nineteenth century, have become questionable measures of this facility and instead mea- sure knowledge and memory, not the ability to reason. While there are also a number of cross-cultural problems with these measurements it is usually agreed that intelligence is attributable to both genetic and envi- ronmental factors (1995, p. 747). Robert Sternberg and Linda O’Hara, after summarising over a century of work in psychology on the relation- ship between creativity and intelligence, including their own research, conclude that:

. . . psychologists still have not reached a consensus on the nature of the relation between creativity and intelligence, nor even of exactly what these constructs are. All possible set relations between creativ- ity and intelligence have been proposed, and there is at least some

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evidence to support each of them. The negative side of this state of affairs is that we can say little with certainty about the relation between creativity and intelligence. (Sternberg & O’Hara in Sternberg 1999, p. 269)

This conclusion indicates that there may indeed be other factors apart from intelligence that can be used to account for exemplary creators. One of these may be talent.

H.J. Walberg, writing in a paper entitled ‘Creativity and Talent as Learning’ (Sternberg 1988), makes a subtle distinction between creativ- ity and talent, but nonetheless sees creativity being dependent on talent no matter whether that talent is constitutional or acquired. Talent, in this view, is malleable and can be enhanced and developed by practice and persistence. The corollary is that ‘genius’, the possession of excep- tional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability or tendency, can be at least partially learned. Walberg argues that highly creative indi- viduals have been exposed to the field they have become experts in and they continually practice the knowledges and operations within that field. As he contends:

Creativity may involve rare rather than unique accomplishments, and it may be useful to think of it as being on one end of a continuum of performance or learning that is attainable by nearly anyone with sufficient instruction and perseverance . . . Linguistic and other environments, especially if they are enduring and powerful, strongly shape accomplishments; societies and individuals, more- over, can choose or determine their environments. Contrary to the notion of instant creativity that was popular in the 1960’s, distin- guished accomplishment seems partly a matter of continuous and concentrated effort over a decade or more. (Walberg in Sternberg 1988, p. 345)

Walberg then goes on to state that simple perseverance, which Negus and Pickering also characterise as ‘obsessive powers of concentration’ (2004, p. 158), may not be adequate in and of itself to achieve excep- tional creativity. However, while other abilities such as good problem- solving techniques, aesthetic ability and originality may play a part, this does not mean that perseverance and practice can be entirely negated. Walberg also asserts that most people are talented but usually only in one or two specialised areas, a notion supported by Weisberg (1993), Gardner (1993) and Csikszentmihalyi (1997). There also seems to be an

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application in terms of creativity of the ‘Matthew Effect’. This concept, proposed by R.K. Merton (1968), was a simple adaptation from the Gospel of St Matthew. It functions on ‘the principle of cumulative advantage’ (Gorny 2007) and in effect states that ‘the rich get richer’. If a person is given the right start and their specialised talents are encouraged and enhanced, by practice, and they also persevere with their access to these specialised knowledges, they will develop their creativity commensurately. In essence Walberg’s position is that ‘envi- ronments affect growth and growth affects environments’ (Sternberg 1988, p. 350). In the end it may simply be that ‘geniuses’ are those who have been presented with opportunities and, given the necessary talent and characteristics adequate to the task, presumably taken those opportunities.

Weisberg concurs with these observations when he concludes his work on what he calls the ‘myth of genius’ by stating that commit- ment and expertise are essential to creative insight. He asserts that ‘great innovations in science and the arts were almost invariably produced by individuals who possessed strong motivation and persistence’ (Weisberg in Sternberg 1988, p. 173). These individuals include a list of notable individuals such as Darwin, Picasso, Edison, Einstein and Beethoven, among many others. Weisberg rightly argues that each of these peo- ple spent lifetimes effectively operating in their respective fields and their extraordinary achievements, the thing that earned them the title ‘genius’, came about at least in part as a result of that lifetime of com- mitment to their work. For Weisberg ‘commitment provides sufficient time for the small changes that occur as one gathers experience in some domain to evolve into something truly original and innovative’(1988, p. 173). He goes on to say that ‘creative products are firmly based on what came before. True originality evolves as the individual goes beyond what others had done before’ (ibid.). The paradox here is, of course, that the instigation of a novel product, idea or process, harking back to Aristotle’s formulation of what constitutes being, is dependent on what pre-exists it. The new is in fact dependent on the old. If this is the case, anyone wishing to be creative should first of all make themselves as familiar as they can with the old, that is, all of the accumulated mate- rial that pre-exists, and could contribute, to their idea. This immersion in what precedes them will aid in providing the necessary background to allow the individual to undertake work in that area, and it also serves to suggest possibilities for modifying and altering earlier products. Weisberg asserts that, in reality, ‘all scientists and artists have extensive training either formally or informally, and very few individuals make

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a mark in the world without a relatively long commitment to an area beyond their actual training’ (Weisberg in Sternberg 1988, p. 173). If this is the case, one must then turn to the acquisition of skill, the mastering of skill and from there the ability to see beyond the paradigms of the rules, forms and structures the creator works within in order to explain exemplary creativity.

According to Sharon Bailin (1988) once the symbol system the creator is engaged with is mastered, the truly creative individual is capable of paradigm shifting innovation. In this regard Bailin argues, in a manner similar to Weisberg, that ‘new ground is broken in a field by criti- cal judgement, but this judgement is itself based upon a repertoire of acquired and assimilated skills in the discipline’ (Bailin 1988, p. 96). She insists:

there is not a real discontinuity between achieving highly within the rules of a discipline and achieving highly when it entails going beyond or changing some rules. The latter is, rather, an extension of the former. It would be incorrect to view any discipline or cre- ative activity as taking place within rigid boundaries and being totally delimited and defined by rules. Instead, the possibilities for what can be achieved are really open-ended. Furthermore, one never breaks down all the rules, since to do so would be to abandon the discipline. (1988, p. 96)

It appears then that the distinction to be drawn between creative and uncreative works is that a creative individual who produces these works must have a genuine understanding of the skills techniques, conven- tions and traditions of the discipline they are working in (Bailin 1988, p. 97). In this case the skills base would also encompass critical judge- ment and, as Bailin argues, in order to shift the creative paradigms of a discipline the artist or creator must be highly skilled, at the leading edge of the discipline and possess a real understanding of that discipline (ibid.).

This position, it could be argued, also leaves little room to account for what has been termed naive or primitive art, or for the existence of child prodigies. However, in an article entitled ‘Creativity and Knowl- edge: A Challenge to Theories’, Robert Weisberg (Sternberg 1999) once again presents evidence that even so-called child prodigies immerse themselves in the domains in which they have been acclaimed rather than simply arriving fully formed, cognisant and competent within a particular domain. He cites the case of Mozart. Weisberg argues that

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The Creator as Genius 25

most of Mozart’s early work, the work that gives him his reputation as a child prodigy, was not creative in the sense that it broke new ground. According to Weisberg:

Mozart’s first masterwork as identified by Hayes (1989) was the Piano Concerto no.9 K.271. This piece was composed more than ten years into Mozart’s career, when he was 21 years old. Mozart’s first four piano concertos (K. 37, 39, 40, 41) were produced in June–July, 1767; Mozart’s age was 11. However, calling these works piano concertos by Mozart is misleading, since they contain no original music by him . . . they were merely arranged by Mozart for a new combina- tion of instruments . . . . This pattern of development indicates that Mozart’s earliest musical experiences involved immersion in the work of others, and probably involved use of the earlier composers’ works as models for how certain compositional problems could be handled. This activity could be considered deliberate practice, under the direc- tion of Mozart’s father, an established musician of some renown, who could be considered a master teacher. In addition, since the young Mozart was also a performer, he probably played these works in his performances, producing still deeper immersion. (Weisberg in Sternberg 1999, pp. 235–6)

These details are confirmed by Michael Howe in his book Genius Explained (1999, pp. 3–7). At the seemingly opposite end of the spec- trum naive or primitive artists are generally seen to be ignorant of the academic rules pertaining to the professional artist. This ignorance, however, may only be partial since they could not be ignorant of the entirety of the conventions and codes of art. They must take on board enough knowledge of the domain of art to engage with the skills required to manipulate the paints, the canvas and the subjects that in themselves entitle them to be called ‘artists’. Oto Bihali-Merin contends that ‘all art is naive to begin with’ (1984, p. 17) and it is when ‘those artists who are sufficiently talented to achieve a certain mastery’ (1984, p. 18) do so that they cease to be classified as naive artists. From this it can be argued that while naive artists exhibit a certain decorative art- lessness and display rudimentary skills in relation to professional artists they, nonetheless, still possess skills. They therefore must at some stage have immersed themselves in the domain of art to a degree that enabled them to engage with it in the first place. In this way craft and art, amateur and professional, draw on the same skills base albeit with dif- fering expertise. The recognition that these are not separate and isolable

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26 Theories about Creativity and Cultural Production

activities once again reinforces the idea P-creativity proceeds along the same continuum as H-creativity. It could thus be proposed that ‘the ordi- nary is not at odds with the exceptional, but continually open to the possibility of becoming exceptional’ (Negus & Pickering 2004, p. 158).

In summing these ideas up it can be said that both Bailin’s and Weisberg’s views, outlined briefly above, correspond to the conception that creativity is the use of imagination, expertise and perseverance to make something new and fresh, transforming the old into something novel or original which may then lead to astounding cultural works. It is the conception of creative genius as an unknowable, mystical process, a view aligned with both the inspirational Platonic view and the Roman- tic ideal, which is problematic here. This is not to say that extraordinary work does not happen. It just means there is a necessity to think of it differently. We need to go beyond the idea of the artist as a specially gifted individual creative worker, engaged in some supra-human task, a conception that can be seen as historically based and the product of a particular society. However, regardless of this necessity, it has been the case that many researchers, particularly in psychology, have not consid- ered to any great extent the social or cultural aspects of creativity and focused their work instead on investigating this phenomenon at the level of individual biology and psychology.

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