The Creative Imperative: Creative Mind vs Creative Industries

The Stedelijk Museum and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam are extremely delighted to welcome Margaret Boden, professor of cognitive science at the University of Sussex, an outstanding pioneer in research on creativity and artificial intelligence alike, and Florian Cramer, research professor at the Rotterdam University of Applied Science, an art historian and sharp critic of contemporary culture for the first out of three lectures on art and creativity.

Now, approximately five years after the peak of the global financial crisis and the budgetary cutbacks by the Dutch government in the cultural field, it is time to critically examine the consequences for creative practice and artistic production. These financial limitations have not just narrowed the space for autonomous work. In addition to cutting back funding for both cultural institutions and universities, the government developed a program to stimulate research and innovation by identifying nine “top sectors.” When the arts find themselves represented in one of these sectors, if at all, it is usually under the “creative industries,” which, according to the government, is “the most dynamic sector of the Dutch economy,” and also includes the fields of design, media, entertainment, fashion, gaming, and architecture. While this high valorization of creativity within a society might sound encouraging at first sight, its economic motivations are both obvious and debatable.

To provide better insight into the diverging expectations and apprehensions connected to concepts and practices of creativity and artistic production, this lecture series aims to scrutinize what such practices in the 20th and 21st century actually entail, questioning the idea of creativity as a kind of ingenious, self-fulfilling creatio ex nihilo, disconnected from societal preconditions. It explores relations between human and mechanical production, the manifold interdependencies of artistic practices, the globalized cultural systems, mass culture, and art-historical attempts of codification, as well as artistic reflections on paradigms of authenticity and innovation.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2015: CREATIVE MIND VS. CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

To inaugurate the three evenings dedicated to a critical revision of the role of creativity in today’s art and culture, we stake out the grounds by first revisiting core concepts of creativity as developed in the cognitive sciences and counter them with a critical inventory of the use of the concept in the Netherlands today.

Margaret Boden will set the scene by providing definitions of core concepts of creativity. She will argue that, first and foremost, creativity is the ability to come up with ideas that are new, surprising, and valuable. There are three kinds of creativity. Combinational creativity produces unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas. Exploratory creativity generates new structures within an already-accepted thinking style. And transformational creativity alters one or more of the rules defining the style so that new structures can be generated which were impossible before. However, as Boden will argue, different cultures value individual creativity to different degrees, which opens the subject for debate and reflection in a specific context.

Florian Cramer will then shift the focus to artistic practice, arguing that in the arts, the words "creative" and "creativity" have traditionally been associated with naive amateurism. It is rather ironical that they now stand for artistic entrepreneurship. A few years after Dutch politics initiated a switch from “arts and culture” to “creative industries,” there is an unexpected side effect: The "creative industries" discourse functions as leverage to overcome traditional divides of artistic disciplines. It does away with the old separation of fine and applied art, and it softens the separation of art and technology. Thus, the neoliberal discourse of "creativity" seems to have finally achieved a tenet of many 19th and 20th century progressive arts movements, from Arts and Crafts to Situationism, Fluxus, and punk. It could be argued that traditionally, the categorical disciplinary divides did not exist in the Netherlands. This lecture will revisit these histories and discuss whether the word "creative," as terrible as it is, might still serve a useful purpose.

MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Margaret Boden is Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex (UK), where she helped develop the world's first academic program in artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science. Her recent books include The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, 2003; Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, 2006; and Creativity and Art: Three Roads to Surprise, 2012.   

Florian Cramer is an Applied Research Professor and Director of Creating 010, the research center affiliated with the Willem de Kooning Academy and Piet Zwart Institute at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences (NL). In the last couple of years, he has moved on from cultural studies of computational poetics (Words Made Flesh, 2004; Exe.cut[up]able Statements, 2011) to practice-oriented research, with a renewed interest in non-institutional arts practices outside old/new media, analog/digital, and fine art vs. applied art dichotomies (Anti-Media, 2013; What is post-digital?, 2014)

MORE ABOUT THE LECTURE SERIES THE CREATIVE IMPERATIVE

The lecture series The Creative Imperative is a collaboration between the Stedelijk Museum and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and consists of three lecture programs which can be separately attended in the fall of 2015. Save the dates for the following lectures in your calendar, as tickets will soon be available online:

stedelijk|forum, sept 10, 2015
The Creative Imperative: Creative Mind vs. Creative Industries
Language: English
Location: Stedelijk Museum, Teijin Auditorium
More info and tickets please find above

stedelijk|forum, oct 8, 2015
The Creative Imperative:  Commodification & “Entkunstung”
Language: English
Location: Stedelijk Museum, Teijin Auditorium
More info and tickets

stedelijk|forum, nov 12, 2015
The Creative Imperative: Creativity in the Readymade Century
Language: English
Location: Stedelijk Museum, Teijin Auditorium
More info and tickets

CREDITS

The Creative Imperative lecture series is a collaboration between the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (Britte Sloothaak, assistant curator) and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Katja Kwastek / Sven Lütticken), within the research cluster “Paradigms of Creativity” of CLUE+, VU’s Interfaculty Research Institute for Culture, History, and Heritage.