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17 books about Creative ability
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17 books about Creative ability
Arousing Sense
Recipes for Workshopping Sensory Experience
Tomie Hahn
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Engaging with sensory experience provides a gateway to the contemplation and cultivation of creativity and ideas. Tomie Hahn's workshopping recipes encourage us to incorporate sensory-rich experiences into our research, creative processes, and understanding of people. The exercises recognize that playfulness allows for a loosening of self while increasing empathy and vulnerability. Their ability to spark sensory endeavors that reach into our deepest core offers potentially profound impacts on art making, research, ethnographic fieldwork, contemplation, philosophical or personal introspections, and many other activities. Designed to be flexible, these living recipes provide an avenue for performative adventures that invite us to improvise in ways suited to our own purposes or settings. Leaders and practitioners enjoy limitless arenas for using the senses for explorations that range from personally transformative to professionally productive to profoundly moving.
User-friendly and practical, Arousing Sense is a guide to how teaching through sensory experience can lead to positive, transformative impact in the classroom and everyday life.
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Bound by Creativity
How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged
Hannah Wohl
University of Chicago Press, 2021
What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is profoundly influenced by social interactions even when artists work alone. Sociologist Hannah Wohl draws on more than one hundred interviews and two years of ethnographic research in the New York contemporary art market to develop a rich sociological perspective of creativity. From inside the studio, we see how artists experiment with new ideas and decide which works to abandon, destroy, put into storage, or exhibit. Wohl then transports readers into the art world, where we discover how artists’ understandings of their work are shaped through interactions in studio visits, galleries, international art fairs, and collectors’ homes.
Bound by Creativity reveals how artists develop conceptions of their distinctive creative visions through experimentation and social interactions. Ultimately, we come to appreciate how judgment is integral to the creative process, both resulting in the creation of original works while also limiting an artist’s ability to break new ground. Exploring creativity through the lens of judgment sheds new light on the production of cultural objects, markets, and prestige.
Bound by Creativity reveals how artists develop conceptions of their distinctive creative visions through experimentation and social interactions. Ultimately, we come to appreciate how judgment is integral to the creative process, both resulting in the creation of original works while also limiting an artist’s ability to break new ground. Exploring creativity through the lens of judgment sheds new light on the production of cultural objects, markets, and prestige.
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The Creating Brain
The Neuroscience of Genius
Nancy C. Andreasen
Dana Press, 2005
Michelangelo was raised in a rustic village by a family of modest means. Shakespeare's father was a middle-class businessman. Abraham Lincoln came from a family of itinerant farmers. Yet all these men broke free from their limited circumstances and achieved brilliant careers as creative artists and leaders. How such extraordinary creativity develops in the human brain is the subject of renowned psychiatrist Nancy Andreasen's The Creating Brain.
Andreasen explains here how the brain produces creative breakthroughs in art, literature, and science, revealing that creativity is not the same thing as intelligence. She scrutinizes the complex factors involved in the development of creativity, including the role of patrons and mentors, "non-standard" educations, and the possession of an "omnivorous" vision. A fascinating interview with acclaimed playwright Neil Simon sheds further light on the creative process.The relationship between genius and insanity also plays an important role in Andreasen's examination. Drawing on her studies of writers in the Iowa Writers' Workshop and other scientific evidence, Andreasen asserts that while creativity may sometimes be linked to mental disorders and may be partially due to familial/genetic factors, neither is inevitable nor needed for creativity to flourish.
Andreasen explains here how the brain produces creative breakthroughs in art, literature, and science, revealing that creativity is not the same thing as intelligence. She scrutinizes the complex factors involved in the development of creativity, including the role of patrons and mentors, "non-standard" educations, and the possession of an "omnivorous" vision. A fascinating interview with acclaimed playwright Neil Simon sheds further light on the creative process.The relationship between genius and insanity also plays an important role in Andreasen's examination. Drawing on her studies of writers in the Iowa Writers' Workshop and other scientific evidence, Andreasen asserts that while creativity may sometimes be linked to mental disorders and may be partially due to familial/genetic factors, neither is inevitable nor needed for creativity to flourish.
Scientist's increasing understanding of the brain's plasticity suggests even more possibilities for nurturing the creative drive, and Andreasen looks ahead to exciting implications for child-rearing and education. The Creating Brain presents an inspiring vision for a future where everyone—not just artists or writers—can fulfill their creative capacity.
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Creativity and Its Discontents
China’s Creative Industries and Intellectual Property Rights Offenses
Laikwan Pang
Duke University Press, 2012
Creativity and Its Discontents is a sharp critique of the intellectual property rights (IPR)–based creative economy, particularly as it is embraced or ignored in China. Laikwan Pang argues that the creative economy—in which creativity is an individual asset to be commodified and protected as property—is an intensification of Western modernity and capitalism at odds with key aspects of Chinese culture. Nevertheless, globalization has compelled China to undertake endeavors involving intellectual property rights. Pang examines China's IPR-compliant industries, as well as its numerous copyright violations. She describes how China promotes intellectual property rights in projects such as the development of cultural tourism in the World Heritage city of Lijiang, the transformation of Hong Kong cinema, and the cultural branding of Beijing. Meanwhile, copyright infringement proliferates, angering international trade organizations. Pang argues that piracy and counterfeiting embody the intimate connection between creativity and copying. She points to the lack of copyright protections for Japanese anime as the motor of China's dynamic anime culture. Theorizing the relationship between knockoffs and appropriation art, Pang offers an incisive interpretation of China's flourishing art scene. Creativity and Its Discontents is a refreshing rejoinder to uncritical celebrations of the creative economy.
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The Cult of Creativity
A Surprisingly Recent History
Samuel W. Franklin
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A history of how, in the mid-twentieth century, we came to believe in the concept of creativity.
Creativity is one of American society’s signature values. Schools claim to foster it, businesses say they thrive on it, and countless cities say it’s what makes them unique. But the idea that there is such a thing as “creativity”—and that it can be cultivated—is surprisingly recent, entering our everyday speech in the 1950s. As Samuel W. Franklin reveals, postwar Americans created creativity, through campaigns to define and harness the power of the individual to meet the demands of American capitalism and life under the Cold War. Creativity was championed by a cluster of professionals—psychologists, engineers, and advertising people—as a cure for the conformity and alienation they feared was stifling American ingenuity. It was touted as a force of individualism and the human spirit, a new middle-class aspiration that suited the needs of corporate America and the spirit of anticommunism.
Amid increasingly rigid systems, creativity took on an air of romance; it was a more democratic quality than genius, but more rarified than mere intelligence. The term eluded clear definition, allowing all sorts of people and institutions to claim it as a solution to their problems, from corporate dullness to urban decline. Today, when creativity is constantly sought after, quantified, and maximized, Franklin’s eye-opening history of the concept helps us to see what it really is, and whom it really serves.
Creativity is one of American society’s signature values. Schools claim to foster it, businesses say they thrive on it, and countless cities say it’s what makes them unique. But the idea that there is such a thing as “creativity”—and that it can be cultivated—is surprisingly recent, entering our everyday speech in the 1950s. As Samuel W. Franklin reveals, postwar Americans created creativity, through campaigns to define and harness the power of the individual to meet the demands of American capitalism and life under the Cold War. Creativity was championed by a cluster of professionals—psychologists, engineers, and advertising people—as a cure for the conformity and alienation they feared was stifling American ingenuity. It was touted as a force of individualism and the human spirit, a new middle-class aspiration that suited the needs of corporate America and the spirit of anticommunism.
Amid increasingly rigid systems, creativity took on an air of romance; it was a more democratic quality than genius, but more rarified than mere intelligence. The term eluded clear definition, allowing all sorts of people and institutions to claim it as a solution to their problems, from corporate dullness to urban decline. Today, when creativity is constantly sought after, quantified, and maximized, Franklin’s eye-opening history of the concept helps us to see what it really is, and whom it really serves.
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Depression
A Public Feeling
Ann Cvetkovich
Duke University Press, 2012
In Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich combines memoir and critical essay in search of ways of writing about depression as a cultural and political phenomenon that offer alternatives to medical models. She describes her own experience of the professional pressures, creative anxiety, and political hopelessness that led to intellectual blockage while she was finishing her dissertation and writing her first book. Building on the insights of the memoir, in the critical essay she considers the idea that feeling bad constitutes the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism.
Cvetkovich draws on an unusual archive, including accounts of early Christian acedia and spiritual despair, texts connecting the histories of slavery and colonialism with their violent present-day legacies, and utopian spaces created from lesbian feminist practices of crafting. She herself seeks to craft a queer cultural analysis that accounts for depression as a historical category, a felt experience, and a point of entry into discussions about theory, contemporary culture, and everyday life. Depression: A Public Feeling suggests that utopian visions can reside in daily habits and practices, such as writing and yoga, and it highlights the centrality of somatic and felt experience to political activism and social transformation.
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The Evolution of Imagination
Stephen T. Asma
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Consider Miles Davis, horn held high, sculpting a powerful musical statement full of tonal patterns, inside jokes, and thrilling climactic phrases—all on the fly. Or think of a comedy troupe riffing on a couple of cues from the audience until the whole room is erupting with laughter. Or maybe it’s a team of software engineers brainstorming their way to the next Google, or the Einsteins of the world code-cracking the mysteries of nature. Maybe it’s simply a child playing with her toys. What do all of these activities share? With wisdom, humor, and joy, philosopher Stephen T. Asma answers that question in this book: imagination. And from there he takes us on an extraordinary tour of the human creative spirit.
Guided by neuroscience, animal behavior, evolution, philosophy, and psychology, Asma burrows deep into the human psyche to look right at the enigmatic but powerful engine that is our improvisational creativity—the source, he argues, of our remarkable imaginational capacity. How is it, he asks, that a story can evoke a whole world inside of us? How are we able to rehearse a skill, a speech, or even an entire scenario simply by thinking about it? How does creativity go beyond experience and help us make something completely new? And how does our moral imagination help us sculpt a better society? As he shows, we live in a world that is only partly happening in reality. Huge swaths of our cognitive experiences are made up by “what-ifs,” “almosts,” and “maybes,” an imagined terrain that churns out one of the most overlooked but necessary resources for our flourishing: possibilities. Considering everything from how imagination works in our physical bodies to the ways we make images, from the mechanics of language and our ability to tell stories to the creative composition of self-consciousness, Asma expands our personal and day-to-day forms of imagination into a grand scale: as one of the decisive evolutionary forces that has guided human development from the Paleolithic era to today. The result is an inspiring look at the rich relationships among improvisation, imagination, and culture, and a privileged glimpse into the unique nature of our evolved minds.
Guided by neuroscience, animal behavior, evolution, philosophy, and psychology, Asma burrows deep into the human psyche to look right at the enigmatic but powerful engine that is our improvisational creativity—the source, he argues, of our remarkable imaginational capacity. How is it, he asks, that a story can evoke a whole world inside of us? How are we able to rehearse a skill, a speech, or even an entire scenario simply by thinking about it? How does creativity go beyond experience and help us make something completely new? And how does our moral imagination help us sculpt a better society? As he shows, we live in a world that is only partly happening in reality. Huge swaths of our cognitive experiences are made up by “what-ifs,” “almosts,” and “maybes,” an imagined terrain that churns out one of the most overlooked but necessary resources for our flourishing: possibilities. Considering everything from how imagination works in our physical bodies to the ways we make images, from the mechanics of language and our ability to tell stories to the creative composition of self-consciousness, Asma expands our personal and day-to-day forms of imagination into a grand scale: as one of the decisive evolutionary forces that has guided human development from the Paleolithic era to today. The result is an inspiring look at the rich relationships among improvisation, imagination, and culture, and a privileged glimpse into the unique nature of our evolved minds.
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How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind
Madness and Black Radical Creativity
La Marr Jurelle Bruce
Duke University Press, 2020
“Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly.” So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as “rage,” and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms. With care and verve, he explores the mad in the literature of Amiri Baraka, Gayl Jones, and Ntozake Shange; in the jazz repertoires of Buddy Bolden, Sun Ra, and Charles Mingus; in the comedic performances of Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle; in the protest music of Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick Lamar, and beyond. These artists activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition. Joining this tradition, Bruce mobilizes a set of interpretive practices, affective dispositions, political principles, and existential orientations that he calls “mad methodology.” Ultimately, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind is both a study and an act of critical, ethical, radical madness.
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The Inspiration Machine
Computational Creativity in Poetry and Jazz
Eitan Y. Wilf
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Explores how creative digital technologies and artificial intelligence are embedded in culture and society.
In The Inspiration Machine, Eitan Y. Wilf explores the transformative potentials that digital technology opens up for creative practice through three ethnographic cases, two with jazz musicians and one with a group of poets. At times dissatisfied with the limitations of human creativity, these artists do not turn to computerized algorithms merely to execute their preconceived ideas. Rather, they approach them as creative partners, delegating to them different degrees of agentive control and artistic decision-making in the hopes of finding inspiration in their output and thereby expanding their own creative horizons.
The algorithms these artists develop and use, however, remain rooted in and haunted by the specific social predicaments and human shortfalls that they were intended to overcome. Experiments in the digital thus hold an important lesson: although Wilf’s interlocutors returned from their adventures with computational creativity with modified, novel, and enriched capacities and predilections, they also gained a renewed appreciation for, and at times a desire to re-inhabit, non-digital creativity. In examining the potentials and pitfalls of seemingly autonomous digital technologies in the realm of art, Wilf shows that computational solutions to the real or imagined insufficiencies of human practice are best developed in relation to, rather than away from, the social and cultural contexts that gave rise to those insufficiencies, in the first place.
In The Inspiration Machine, Eitan Y. Wilf explores the transformative potentials that digital technology opens up for creative practice through three ethnographic cases, two with jazz musicians and one with a group of poets. At times dissatisfied with the limitations of human creativity, these artists do not turn to computerized algorithms merely to execute their preconceived ideas. Rather, they approach them as creative partners, delegating to them different degrees of agentive control and artistic decision-making in the hopes of finding inspiration in their output and thereby expanding their own creative horizons.
The algorithms these artists develop and use, however, remain rooted in and haunted by the specific social predicaments and human shortfalls that they were intended to overcome. Experiments in the digital thus hold an important lesson: although Wilf’s interlocutors returned from their adventures with computational creativity with modified, novel, and enriched capacities and predilections, they also gained a renewed appreciation for, and at times a desire to re-inhabit, non-digital creativity. In examining the potentials and pitfalls of seemingly autonomous digital technologies in the realm of art, Wilf shows that computational solutions to the real or imagined insufficiencies of human practice are best developed in relation to, rather than away from, the social and cultural contexts that gave rise to those insufficiencies, in the first place.
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Locating Cultural Creativity
John Liep
Pluto Press, 2001
The Lyric in the Age of the Brain
Nikki Skillman
Harvard University Press, 2016
Exploration of our inner life—perception, thought, memory, feeling—once seemed a privileged domain of lyric poetry. Scientific discoveries, however, have recently supplied physiological explanations for what was once believed to be transcendental; the past sixty years have brought wide recognition that the euphoria of love is both a felt condition and a chemical phenomenon, that memories are both representations of lived experience and dynamic networks of activation in the brain. Caught between a powerful but reductive scientific view of the mind and traditional literary metaphors for consciousness that have come to seem ever more naive, American poets since the sixties have struggled to articulate a vision of human consciousness that is both scientifically informed and poetically truthful.
The Lyric in the Age of the Brain examines several contemporary poets—Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Robert Creeley, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, and experimentalists such as Harryette Mullen and Tan Lin—to discern what new language, poetic forms, and depictions of selfhood this perplexity forces into being. Nikki Skillman shows that under the sway of physiological conceptions of mind, poets ascribe ever less agency to the self, ever less transformative potential to the imagination. But in readings that unravel factional oppositions in contemporary American poetry, Skillman argues that the lyric—a genre accustomed to revealing expansive aesthetic possibilities within narrow formal limits—proves uniquely positioned to register and redeem the dispersals of human mystery that loom in the age of the brain.
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Making in School and Public Libraries
Edited by Kristin Fontichiaro, Caroline Wack, Tori Culler, and Nicole Sype
Michigan Publishing Services, 2020
Whether you are just beginning your library’s maker efforts or are recalibrating a few years into your work, Making in School and Public Libraries is designed to help you grow your makerspace in a way that is engaging, affordable, and sustainable. Building on eight years of makerspace activities in the Michigan Makers and Making in Michigan Libraries project, the authors share their experiences creating or co-creating makerspace spaces and activities with for a wide band of interests, materials, tools, age groups, communities, budgets, and needs.
Readers will gain practical insights about how to
- Define goals and target audiences
- Customize programs to meet community needs
- Equip a makerspace
- Document activities
- Assess achievements and areas for growth
- Engage makers in a variety of technology and hands-on activities, including robots, 3D printing, sewing, cardboard challenges, knitting and crochet, design thinking, and zines
The authors’ experiences include co-creating one of the nation’s first school library makerspaces; establishing after-school maker programs with elementary and middle school learners; co-designing one-off and ongoing maker events for community-building in diverse public libraries; engaging with senior citizens in a low-income Senior Summer Camp pilot; and state, national, and international workshops for teachers, librarians, and youth mentors.
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The Mind's Best Work
D. N. Perkins
Harvard University Press, 1981
Over the years, tales about the creative process have flourished-tales of sudden insight and superior intelligence and personal eccentricity. Coleridge claimed that he wrote "Kubla Khan" in one sitting after an opium-induced dream. Poe declared that his "Raven" was worked out "with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem."
D. N. Perkins discusses the creative episodes of Beethoven, Mozart, Picasso, and others in this exploration of the creative process in the arts, sciences, and everyday life.
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Off the Walls
Inspired Re-Creations of Iconic Artworks
Sarah Waldorf
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2020
When life (in a global pandemic) imitates art . . .
Van Gogh’s Starry Night made out of spaghetti? Cat with a Pearl Earring? Frida Kahlo self-portraits with pets and toilet paper? While the world reeled from the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), thousands of people around the globe, inspired by challenges from Getty and other museums, raided toy chests, repurposed pantry items, and enlisted family, roommates, and animals to re-create famous works of art at home. Astonishing in their creativity, wit, and ingenuity, these creations remind us of the power of art to unite us and bring joy during troubled times. Off the Walls: Inspired Re-Creations of Iconic Artworks celebrates these imaginative re-creations, bringing highlights from this challenge together in one whimsical, irresistible volume. Getty Publications will donate all profits from the sale of this book to a charity supporting art and artists.
Van Gogh’s Starry Night made out of spaghetti? Cat with a Pearl Earring? Frida Kahlo self-portraits with pets and toilet paper? While the world reeled from the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), thousands of people around the globe, inspired by challenges from Getty and other museums, raided toy chests, repurposed pantry items, and enlisted family, roommates, and animals to re-create famous works of art at home. Astonishing in their creativity, wit, and ingenuity, these creations remind us of the power of art to unite us and bring joy during troubled times. Off the Walls: Inspired Re-Creations of Iconic Artworks celebrates these imaginative re-creations, bringing highlights from this challenge together in one whimsical, irresistible volume. Getty Publications will donate all profits from the sale of this book to a charity supporting art and artists.
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Please RSVP
Questions on Collaborative Aesthetics, Trans-Subjectivity, and the Politics of Love
April Durham
Dartmouth College Press, 2019
It’s no secret that working with others, rather than alone, on a creative project can often yield the most unexpected results, a new and surprising sum greater than the whole of its parts. Please RSVP presents a bold new theory of just how powerful collaboration can be in the making of art. April Durham argues that collaborative activity has the potential to broaden and expand an individual participant’s static identity through what she calls “trans-subjectivity.” She offers a fine-grained analysis of the ways in which personal subjectivity becomes porous and malleable during the process of shared creative labor. Durham’s concept of the trans-subjective offers a new way to come to terms with the networks, either digital or otherwise, that have developed over the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, providing a bold new frame for topics like the experience of time, community, language, and ethics. This is a crucial and eye-opening book for contemporary artists and art historians alike.
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Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts
Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama
University of Texas Press, 2010
Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts brings together in one volume cutting-edge research that turns to recent findings in cognitive and neurobiological sciences, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines, to explore and understand more deeply various cultural phenomena, including art, music, literature, and film. The essays fulfilling this task for the general reader as well as the specialist are written by renowned authors H. Porter Abbott, Patrick Colm Hogan, Suzanne Keen, Herbert Lindenberger, Lisa Zunshine, Katja Mellman, Lalita Pandit Hogan, Klarina Priborkin, Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach, Ellen Spolsky, and Richard Walsh. Among the works analyzed are plays by Samuel Beckett, novels by Maxine Hong Kingston, music compositions by Igor Stravinsky, art by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, and films by Michael Haneke. Each of the essays shows in a systematic, clear, and precise way how music, art, literature, and film work in and of themselves and also how they are interconnected. Finally, while each of the essays is unique in style and methodological approach, together they show the way toward a unified knowledge of artistic creativity.
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The Wisdom of the Ego
George E. Vaillant
Harvard University Press, 1998
One of America's preeminent psychiatrists draws on his famous Study of Adult Development to give us an exhilarating look at how the mind's defenses work. What we see as the mind's trickery, George Vaillant tells us, is actually healthy. What's more, it can reveal the mind at its most creative and mature, soothing and protecting us in the face of unbearable reality, managing the unmanageable, ordering disorder. And because creativity is so intrinsic to this alchemy of the ego, Vaillant mingles his studies of obscure lives with psychobiographies of famous artists and others--including Florence Nightingale, Sylvia Plath, Anna Freud, and Eugene O'Neill.
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