10.13135/2036-542X/7596
application/pdf
2036-542X
7596
2
en
Erkki Huovinen
Trópos
On Attributing Artistic Creativity
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos
4
Monografica
2012-04-01
2023-05-21
2012-04-01
2023-05-22
65-86
1
Erkki Huovinen
2011
10.13135/2036-542X/7596
65
University of Minnesota
2036-542X
2
en
86
On Attributing Artistic Creativity
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos/article/download/7596/6331
4
                                                                      isbn 978-88-548-4716-3 – ISSN 2036-542X-11002
                                                                              doi 10.4399/97888548471635 – pp. 65-86




   On Attributing Artistic Creativity
                                    Erkki Huovinen
                                  University of Minnesota




Abstract: This article argues that conceptions of artistic creativity and thus the practices
  of the artworld are centrally regulated by an ideal of an artist who personally undergoes
  experiences of novelty, originality, uniqueness, or surprise. Such subjective creativity
  responses arise largely due to the artistic media that invariably defy complete control
  by the artist – a fact that is not only accepted by many artists themselves but also often
  regarded by them as highly desirable. Consequently, at the heart of artistic creativity
  there lies an opposition to a fluent ‘extension of the mind into the medium,’ unlike in
  other fields of expertise where mastery is indicated by automatism and increasing trans-
  parency of tools. This provides a counterargument to theories that see the criterion of
  art status in successfully realized artistic intentions. Further, it is argued that the belief
  in artists’ subjective creativity responses differentiates artistic creativity from creative
  problem solving in general. This constitutes a sincerity requirement for artistic creativ-
  ity that also seems highly resistant to challenges by individual artists. The crucial role of
  artistic media in eliciting artists’ creativity responses, and thus in grounding attributions
  of artistic creativity, is not duly recognized by theories which see the gist of artistic
  creativity in conceptual restructuring or innovation.

Keywords: Creativity, art, aesthetics, medium, sincerity.




1. The Mind and the Medium

   According to a commonly held assumption, creative work is essentially
mental activity. In the history of aesthetic thought, we have seen this spelled
out in idealist theories of art like that of Collingwood (1958: 134), who
believed that when a composer makes a tune, this is something that “goes
on in his head, and nowhere else.” Such views of absolutely internal crea-
tion are sometimes embraced by artists themselves as well, if not for other
reasons than for the subjective sense of active agency they may offer. When
Pushkin wrote, “I am sweetly lulled by my imagination, and poetry awakens
within me” (translated in Cooke 1998: 12), his attitude also clearly reflected
the romantic ideal of artists’ inward emotions as a source for creation. In a

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wider perspective, however, artists are at least equally often heard to empha-
size that creative work crucially relies on the artistic medium, residing out-
side of the head. In 20th century art, this was indeed a commonplace view.
Painter Robert Motherwell, as one of the more articulate adherents of such
an externalistic position, even claimed that there is a general “ignorance” of
creativity that is, in part, due to “vastly underrating the role of the medium.”
Motherwell described the artist’s interaction with a medium as a “living col-
laboration” in which the medium has the same potential for responding to
feelings of love as another human being might have (Ashton, Banach 2007:
214-215). In this view, what is created could not be created simply in the
head, but only comes about in and through the interactive relationship with
the artistic medium.
    In the philosophy of art, the constitutive role of the interaction with
a medium for art making was famously emphasized by John Dewey. For
Dewey, the “act of expression is not something which supervenes upon
an inspiration already complete” (Dewey 1980: 68). Instead, the mark of
artistic creativity can be seen in the ability to “build up simultaneously the
idea and its objective embodiment” (Dewey 1980: 53) which leads to an
“intimate union of doing and undergoing” (Dewey 1980: 54). The artist
can only realize her individuality in producing a work of art “in interaction
with surrounding conditions,” by encountering the “resistances” that they
offer (Dewey 1980: 293). Consequently, aesthetic experience (including the
experiences of a creative artist) is uniquely characterized by a lack of dis-
tinction between the self and the object (Dewey 1980: 259). To the extent
that such “complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and
events” (Dewey 1980: 18) is subjectively experienced in artistic creativity, an
outside observer might be tempted to ask if this is because some aspects of
the environment genuinely participate in the artist’s mental activity. Does
the artist really ‘think in the medium,’ and if so, does this mean that her mind
somehow extends to the medium?
    Here one may recall what is perhaps the best-known argument concern-
ing the extended mind, the Otto case presented by Clark and Chalmers
(1998). Briefly, Otto is an Alzheimer patient who uses a notebook to record
important information in order to retrieve it from there when needed, sub-
stituting this tool for the fully operational memory of a healthy person. On
hearing about an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Otto consults
the notebook, finds the previously recorded information that the museum
is on 53rd Street, and sets off to see the exhibition.Whereas a healthy person
could retrieve the same address information from her biological memory,
Otto thus stores his long-term beliefs in the notebook, outside of his head.

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Clark and Chalmers treat such examples referring to a parity principle: “If,
as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which,
were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of
the cognitive process, then that part of the world is […] part of the cogni-
tive process” (Clark and Chalmers 1998: 8, emphases in the original). Otto’s
notebook, then, turns out to be a part of his cognitive process, and hence
part of his mind. Now, can a similar argument be made to work in the case
of artistic creativity?
    A crucial factor in the Otto case is that his notebook use is taken to have
become so automatic that he can rely on it as ‘transparently’ as another per-
son would use her biological memory. Such images of transparency are also
well ingrained in conceptions concerning master artists who present virtu-
osity in handling their equipment without detailed thought of the mechan-
ics involved – indeed, as if the thought process would take place within the
larger system extending from the artist’s head into the medium employed.
From this perspective, one might perhaps want to say that to the extent that
Olivia, a painter, is a master of her artistic medium, her situation is on par
with the Otto case. Both Olivia and Otto operate external equipment as
transparent parts of their cognitive processes. If so, then the extent to which
the artist’s external equipment participates in a truly mental process would
presumably depend on the degree of transparency involved. Less capable art-
ists might fall short of achieving a truly extended mind to the same extent
that, for instance, my clumsiness with notebooks prevents notebooks from
being qualified as genuine parts of my cognitive machinery. The extended
mind theorist might also claim that the function that a painter’s canvas has in
storing visual configurations, and thus aiding recall and planning of further
actions, simply expedites the work for someone who is not a master artist. If
so – if all of the planning required for the painting might conceivably take
place in Olivia’s head – then by the parity principle Olivia’s possible use
of the external canvas to aid planning would be a contingent aspect of her
truly mental process.
    The role of the medium in this story does seem to accord with the idea
of a vehicle, as Menary (2007: 15) uses it in a general definition of cogni-
tive process: a “process is cognitive when it aims at completing a cognitive
task; and it is constituted by manipulating a vehicle.” As demonstrated by
the Otto case, the role of such a vehicle might not appreciably depend on
whether it is inside or outside the head. However, Menary’s definition also
highlights another obvious aspect of what it takes for something to be a
cognitive process: it has to aim at completing a cognitive task. This is indeed
the problem that the extended mind view would have with artistic creativ-

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ity. The artistically creative task is not merely a cognitive task, as would be
the case with many forms of creative problem solving. It is also and primar-
ily a task of producing something extra-cognitive – in the simple sense that
artworks are usually taken to endure even after the demise of the artist un-
like such paradigmatically cognitive entities as thoughts or memories. For
all the insight inherent in observations about ‘thinking in a medium,’ then,
the artist’s task is never really completed by something irreducibly cognitive.
While the artist’s mind may conceivably be taken to extend to the medium
through her cognitive processes that rely on external vehicles, reducing ar-
tistic creativity to nothing but a mental process would do injustice to the
poietic nature of art-making.
    The notion that artistic creativity is not merely a cognitive process but
necessarily includes producing something that is external to cognition
sounds trivial, but it does direct our attention to the fact that the artist
herself may be surprised at her own creation. This is because, first, all artis-
tic media are capable of supporting virtually infinitely complex relational
networks of items and, second, any cognitive approach to such a medium is
necessarily perspectival by nature and thus limited in its scope. For present
purposes, the items in question might equally well be defined in atomistic
terms (‘this blue circle,’ ‘the word “girl”,’ ‘the middle C’), in some formal-
syntactic manner (‘golden section,’ ‘opening paragraph,’ ‘cadential dominant
prolongation’), by focusing on emotionally interpreted gestures (‘graceful
posture,’ ‘the shocking farewell scene,’ ‘the energizing surge of the violins’),
using cultural interpretations (‘utopian image,’ ‘psychoanalytic depth,’ ‘mili-
taristic precision’), and so on. In any event, while concentrating to balance,
juxtapose, or perhaps offset some such items with respect to one another,
the artist cannot but ignore a huge number of other relational considera-
tions afforded by the work. The medium will always be richer in the un-
derstandings it affords than may be covered by the artist’s own perspectival
view. What this means is, in effect, that the artist cannot completely control
all that happens in the medium.The artistic medium remains irreducibly re-
calcitrant. In the following, I will claim that such uncontrollability, far from
being a defect in the artist’s competence, is actually at the heart of what is
expected of artistic creativity.


2. Subjective Creativity Responses

   Accounts of creativity often involve a list of attributes that are shared by
creative products and/or creative behavior. Typically, these include such at-

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tributes as novelty, originality, uniqueness, and surprisingness. However, there
appears to be no clear agreement between different accounts about how ex-
actly such attributes are related to artistic creativity or value (see Vermazen
1991). One reason for the lack of consensus might be that the wide variety
of experiences elicited by creative actions, products, and ideas does not fall
into natural categories. Responses to observed novelty, originality, unique-
ness, or surprisingness may dovetail one another, making the exact name
given to such responses somewhat arbitrary and less consequential than is
the fact that we recognize the general orientation of these responses. For
now, it will be enough to refer to all such responses as creativity responses, or
C-responses, for short. Such responses are, of course, exemplified by explicit
attributions of creativity to actions, products, and ideas. Even more often,
C-responses are implicit reactions to what is experienced as inventive, sali-
ently new, surprisingly revealing, or strikingly alluring, or reactions to the
way in which some entity suggests a new way of seeing, hearing, or under-
standing. Examples may include being astonished or surprised at – or simply
being drawn to focus one’s attention on – some previously unencountered
features in otherwise familiar objects. Apart from cases of bewilderment or
surprise, C-responses might also include making the cool judgment that a
certain idea presents an unlikely but fortuitously helpful perspective to some
field of thought. A C-response is, then, any reaction by a human observer or
evaluator to an action, product, or idea due to some novel, unique, original,
or surprising feature observed in it.
    From the history of science we know that the subjective, sudden ‘sense
of understanding’ that researchers sometimes feel in breakthrough moments
of creative problem solving may be a rather unreliable indicator of the final
worth of the ideas in question (Trout 2002). The same evidently pertains
to artists’ subjective C-responses, should these come to be treated as crite-
ria for later interpretation and evaluation of artistic products. As the poet
W.B. Yeats (1961: 314) suggested, the “delight in what is unforeseen” may
sometimes be but “intellectual innocence.” An anguished teenager may feel
amazing revelations in creating his first heart-broken attempts at poetry, but
no critic would take the magnitude of the youngster’s feeling as a reliable
guide to how good or creative the composed poem should be judged in
some historical sense. It is well understood, then, that C-responses always
emerge relative to an observer’s prior familiarity with and understanding
of the domain of action or thought in question. Attributions of novelty to
an idea may differ between the originator of the idea herself, the public at
large, and the community of experts customarily dealing with similar ideas;
hence the distinction often made between subjective or psychological nov-

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elty (experienced by an individual creative person) and historical novelty
which requires the absolute newness of the idea with a view to the whole
human history (e.g., Boden 1991).
    If the bias in psychological creativity research often tends to fall on the
latter aspect of historical novelty, it must largely be for methodological
purposes. To get started, such research typically requires some consensus
as to which human products are creative ones in the first place. The log-
ic is straightforward: if we want to know whether condition A or condi-
tion B will better engender creative thinking or action, we have to assess
the products from these conditions for their observed degree of novelty or
originality. For such assessments, the psychologist usually relies on expert
opinion, standardized tests, or the judgment of history. It is then ultimately
the reception of products and social consensus among appropriate observ-
ers that determine whether some activities are judged to have been creative
in the first place (cf. Amabile 1983). In this general approach, theories of
creativity tend to become theories of “creative contributions to a domain”
– theories of what “moves a field forward” or what “changes a domain” (see,
e.g., Lubart, Sternberg 1995; Csikszentmihalyi 1996; Sternberg 1999; Stern-
berg 2006). Consequently, the degree of creativity of artistic products easily
gets equated with the respective artists’ canonical status. Taken to its logical
conclusion, the approach leads to the view that an action which was not
creative when it appeared might become one after its author’s death (e.g.,
Csikszentmihalyi, Rich 1997: 56).
    However, an interesting fact about C-responses is that having them is by
no means only valued by the audience, but also by the artists themselves. As
noted above, there are good reasons to believe that the artistic medium is, in
principle, always capable of functioning as a major source of surprise for the
artist herself. Noticing this, artists sometimes willingly admit the lack of to-
tal control over their results.Writer Annie Dillard (2001), for instance, points
out that the finished work is not the author’s previous “vision filled in” but
rather its “replacement:” in the creative act, the page “always wins” over the
author trying to tame her vision to it. Apart from accepting the resistance
of their media, artists may come to consider the “victory of the page” as
the mark of artistic success. Thus, in discussing creative writers’ descriptions
of writing that they had considered especially successful, Doyle (1998: 32)
mentions that “they no longer spoke of themselves as active agents,” but
rather “described their experience in much more passive terms, as if the
fictionworld were acting on them.”
    It is not surprising, then, that artists may in fact even actively seek ways
to loosen their immediate grip of the medium. For example, the jazz trum-

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peter Don Cherry reportedly changed his mouthpiece size every once in
a while in order to remain alert in the creative improvisatory situation –
something that from a technocratic expert perspective would make no sense
at all, as such changes in the physical tools will easily lead to technical mis-
takes. Similarly, whatever critics may say of the control and mastery that the
painter Jackson Pollock undoubtedly exerted over his drip paintings, it is
inevitable that the choice of separating the paintbrush from physical contact
with the canvas must also have relatively speaking loosened his grip on the
medium. Such choices bespeak the willingness to relinquish some of the
detailed control over the medium, perhaps exactly in favor of engendering
fresh subjective experiences in the interaction with it. In less professional
art-making, a befitting analogy is found in how practitioners of expres-
sive arts therapy sometimes give their clients pre-moistened paper for use
with watercolors: the somewhat unpredictable behavior of the color on the
moistened paper is considered to free the client’s imagination and lessen
unwanted control by thoroughly thought-out intentions.
    One way to understand such attitudes is to say that some artists may favor
subjective C-responses over perfect technical expertise and achievement of
ever more detailed control over the medium. For this reason, I suspect there
to be at least a grain of truth in the ‘tension view’ expressed in expertise
research wherein some tenets of expertise are seen to be counterproduc-
tive to creativity (cf. Weisberg 2006). Instead of exceedingly relying on the
past by increased knowledge and habit, as experts in various fields typically
do, the artist may value breaking her own habits, for instance by deliberate
modifications of her tools. Instead of relying more and more on automatic
modes of responding – another common trait of expertise – the artist may
seek situations in which any automatisms are disrupted by surprises from
the medium. In all this, the artist thus willfully obstructs the transparency
of her tools, in effect working against a fluid extension of her mind into the
medium. While there is no reason to claim universality for such a tendency
in all art making, when it does appear in professional artists’ work it speaks
against interpreting the transparency of tools – or, accordingly, the purport-
ed extension of the artist’s mind into the medium – as a consistent marker
of artistic competence.
    The fact that artists may value subjective C-responses over and above
personal control over the medium provides a simple counterargument to
any aesthetic theory that sees the criterion of art status in successfully real-
ized artistic intentions. In this vein, Nick Zangwill has claimed that success
in realizing artistic intentions ultimately decides between art and non-art:
“in artistic activity, there is an intention that by creating an object or event

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with certain nonaesthetic properties, certain dependent aesthetic proper-
ties will be produced” (Zangwill 2007: 40). The assumption is that artworks
must have their origins in an insight into the dependency between aesthetic
and nonaesthetic properties. Furthermore, such insight is based on the art-
ist’s “vision of a non-actual thing with the aesthetic/nonaesthetic property
combination or of an actual thing that lacks these properties” (Zangwill
2007: 43). In other words, the artist envisions certain aesthetic-properties-
supervenient-on-certain-non-aesthetic-properties, and goes on to produce
actions that bring these preconceived properties into being. Theories such
as Zangwill’s do not require the whole artwork to appear as a potentiality
in the artist’s mind before its actualization, but nevertheless – despite una-
voidable concessions in passing to the possibility of “thinking in acting and
making” (Zangwill 2007: 45) – they see the real engine of art-making in the
artists’ veridical insight into what each of their actions will result in. Given
many an artist’s willingness to experience surprises in the medium and even
to seek them by relinquishing some of one’s own control, an emphasis of
the artist’s prior insight to some aesthetic/nonaesthetic dependencies as the
fundamental tenet of art-making appears rather unrealistic to say the least.


3. Belief in the Sincere Artist

    Above, it was seen that psychological research on creativity typically de-
termines the degree of creativity of human products and actions with refer-
ence to interpersonal consensus concerning what has been novel or origi-
nal, thus at least superficially downplaying the originator’s own C-responses.
Such relative de-emphasis of the originator’s views might seem to parallel
the well-known anti-intentionalist tradition in humanities in which the in-
tentions of an author were discredited as being criterial for reaching accept-
able interpretations of literary artworks. Indeed, supposing that the range
of suitable interpretations concerning the content of artworks is not bound
by the artist’s own intentions, these works’ creativity status is also likely
to remain independent of such intentions. However, the reasonings in the
two argumentative traditions are in fact almost opposite. Whereas in literary
studies the anti-intentionalistic ‘death of the author’ movement was fueled
by the wish to liberate the written text to a multiplicity of interpretations,
the creativity psychologists’ tendency to dismiss the author’s views rather
follows from the wish to restrict the possible interpretations concerning the
creativity status of the product in question. What is assumed is that for each
product, at a given time, there exists a more or less correct view concerning

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its degree of creativity, and that for this view, the originator of the product
might not always be a very reliable informant.
    Now, in anti-intentionalist theories of interpretation, the author easily got
thrown over the board once and for all even when this might really not have
been required. Consider Beardsley’s (1965: 301) claim that the value of artis-
tic products is “independent of the manner of production, even of whether
the work was produced by an animal or by a computer or by a volcano or
by a falling slop-bucket.” What should have been of primary importance to
Beardsley is the first claim – that artistic value is independent of the manner
of production – but this might also be articulated without opening the door
to falling slop-buckets. Even if the artistic value of a work be independent
of the exact manner of how the artist produced it, this by no means implies
that the value of the object as art would be unaffected by the consideration
that we take it to be produced by a human being (or a relevantly similar
creature) rather than by a falling slop-bucket. Hence, when psychological
creativity research makes statements about the degree of creativity in some
object, the rationality of such discussion seems to involve a presupposition
– albeit not a proof – that the object’s coming into what it is has involved
a human agent. I think that this must be so because, outside of theological
contexts, attributing creativity to a product only really makes sense against
the assumption that there has been some originator with a relevant concern
for producing C-responses. Let us look more closely at this claim in the
cases of creative problem solving and artistic creativity, respectively.
    To understand something as a problem is, ipso facto, to understand that it
involves potential to be resolved in a way that can be appreciated as bringing
something new and valuable to the view. In other words, problems involve
potential for producing C-responses. Our belief that Susan has been crea-
tive in solving a mathematical problem entails that we assume Susan to have
identified the problem as such, and thus (at least implicitly) to have under-
stood its solution to potentially elicit C-responses in those who see it as a
problem.1 However, even if our belief in Susan’s problem-solving creativity
implies that we believe her to have understood the problem as such (and
thus to have had an interest in producing C-responses), it does not neces-
sitate a belief that Susan herself has shown a C-response. This is because the
significance of problems as problems does not depend on the contingent
human psychology of the person who happens to come up with a solution.
To see this, consider that Susan is in fact an author of self-help books on
    1
      If Mary does not see any problem there but, say, just happens to embody or represent its solution
in her activity, it would typically be some other person noticing the key to the solution in Mary’s
activity that would be credited for exemplifying creative problem solving.

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creative thinking. She has some tried and true methods of developing logi-
cal puzzles, visual paradoxes and mathematical problems which she knows
to require creative insights by the readers to be solved. In crafting her brain
teasers, Susan also works out the solutions for herself, but with her years of
experience in the domain these solutions stimulate no C-responses in her
herself. Despite this, we might want to credit Susan with creativity in work-
ing out her highly original puzzles, well knowing her to be sensitive to the
C-responses elicited by the solutions in most readers. Attributing creative
problem solving to a person implies that she has some relevant interest in
producing C-responses, though not necessarily ones of her own.
    As regards artistic creativity, things appear to be different. Too much cal-
culation on the audience’s C-responses by the artist is often treated with sus-
picion, which is well demonstrated in how visual advertisements, regardless
of aesthetic qualities, are typically not quite appreciated like gallery art. This
is probably not because it would be supposed that it is wrong for an artist
to care about others’ C-responses. Rather, just because such responses can be
produced by mere calculation – without the producer showing C-responses
oneself – observers may sometimes be careful not to attribute high levels of
artistic creativity to processes that are known to be directed by instrumental
concerns. Seen from this perspective, the distinction between art and craft
would be, then, not so much a matter of creative and non-creative domains
of activity, but a distinction between domains of creative activity which are
and are not dominated by an implicit belief that what we are made to expe-
rience is selected into this role on the basis of someone else’s C-responses. In
short, attributing artistic creativity to an object is reasonably taken to imply
a belief that the object has been sincerely presented by an artist as valuable
due, at least in part, to her own C-responses to it. This could be called the
sincerity requirement for artistic creativity.
    When Marcel Duchamp’s readymade Fountain was first rejected from the
show of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, it could well have been
because of the suspicion that the artist had not been sincere in this sense.To-
day, such institutionally established art movements as readymade art should
indeed have taught us to be careful in defining art with recourse to such cri-
teria as artists’ C-responses. Just as it is possible for an artist to work against
the established ethical or other codes of her art form, it is, of course, possible
for her to work against the assumption that the work of art will have evoked
some C-responses in the artist herself. In fact, this is not even very difficult
to achieve in individual cases. That the art world modifies its conceptions
of what art can be in response to such challenges is well known. However,
I would think that the sincerity requirement presents an intuition which

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is much more resistant to intentional violations by working artists than are
any intuitions concerning the subject matter, materials and techniques, or,
say, moral underpinnings appropriate to and expected of artworks. Without
the implicit ideal of a sincere, authentic, personal artist who will have herself
experienced some tensions, surprises, and revelations in response to her own
work, the art world as we know it would probably cease to exist.
    Notice, however, that the sincerity requirement is also loose enough
to accommodate shifts of value judgment across individuals, institutional
frameworks, and time. In particular, such ‘problematic’ movements as ready-
made art or minimal art appear much less problematic against a loose sin-
cerity requirement than they might appear against some more definite ex-
pectations of, say, interesting originality. For example, when exhibitions of
minimal art in the 1960s appeared ‘boring’ to some observers, raising ques-
tions of whether something that totally seems to lack human interest can be
a work of art at all, there was still no question of these phenomena being of
a new kind (Colpitt 1990: 116–117). Even if it might have sometimes been
unclear to the audience what it exactly was that artists such as Frank Stella or
Andy Warhol saw in their own work, I don’t think it was unclear that they
did see something in it themselves, and wanted to present their work on
this account. Understanding artworks as creative products does not require,
say, replicating the artist’s own imaginative experience (as in Collingwood
1958: 308), but it does require what I take to have been the valuable core in
even such unrealistic claims: the fallibilistic belief that there is some analogy
between the artist’s response to her work and the way the audience may
come to experience it.
    In this perspective, what we learn from institutional theories of art is
that the art world is a system in which the displaying function will always
provide a safety net against possible lack of C-responses on the artist’s part.
Consider a situation in which a typewritten poem that Ben submits for
publication in a poetry journal strikes the editor as hilariously original in its
unheard-of associations and its curiously novel, distorted language – until it
is revealed that what the editor had received in fact represents a lucky ac-
cident in Ben’s monkey’s activity of entertaining himself by making sounds
on a typewriter. Rather than typing at random (as in the notorious case
of an ideal monkey producing the works of Shakespeare in the course of
an infinite succession of random typings), Ben’s monkey might even have
shown C-responses to the sounds produced, being nevertheless indifferent
to the scattered visual marks concurrently appearing on the paper, and in-
capable of entertaining any interest in them or imagining that others would
either. As a literary achievement, these marks would most likely strike any

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real-time observer of the monkey’s activities as utterly non-creative. How-
ever, even after hearing about the true origin of the ‘poem,’ it would still be
open for the journal editor to see it as a creative product of poetry, but this
could only be because of his belief in Ben’s understanding of the game and
sincerity in wishing to display an item such as this as a poem. It does not
matter much whether we think of Ben as a Duchampian displayer (perhaps
initially fooling the editor) or whether we think of him as an artist work-
ing in a relatively loose medium – using the monkey-typewriter setup as a
rather non-transparent tool (in which case he would not have fooled the
editor). The point is that even if we may sometimes make mistakes in treat-
ing the products of slop-buckets or monkeys as valuable products of artistic
creativity, such valuations would not make much sense without the general
expectation of C-responses on the part of some producing agent, and that
the art world has found and probably will in the foreseeable future find ways
of keeping this assumption in force.


4. An Alternative View: Conceptual Restructuring

    But surely, the critic may now argue, the artist’s actual C-responses may
sometimes also fail to pick exactly those objects that would merit such re-
sponses. If we want a subject-relative conception of creativity, wouldn’t it
nevertheless be better to construct it with some more objective criteria in
view? For example, Margaret Boden suggests that to be psychologically
creative, an idea has to be fundamentally novel with respect to the individual
mind which had the idea. She explains that whether or not others have had
the same idea before, a person’s idea is psychologically creative if she could
not have had it before (Boden 1990: 32). Remarkably, such a view allows
even computers to be ‘psychologically’ creative, given that their novel out-
puts are not simply results of, say, following some pre-existing rule system.
Indeed, the crucial question for Boden is not the novelty value of the out-
puts per se, but rather “whether the output was generated by processes that
explore, test, map and/or transform the conceptual space inhabited by the
program concerned” (Boden 1990: 135). In Boden’s analysis, then, an idea
is psychologically creative to you when it is new to your mind in the sense
that you couldn’t have had it before for the reason that getting this idea in-
volved some degree of restructuring your relevant conceptual spaces.
    Admittedly, such a view is difficult to argue against, because of the well-
entrenched role of conceptual restructuring – or ‘bisociation’ of hither-
to disparate frames of reference (Koestler 1964) – in notions of problem-

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solving creativity. The literature on creativity is brimming with accounts
of sudden insights in which an inventor transformed the field in question
in some dramatic conceptual manner by seeing a connection that hadn’t
been recognized before. There is, of course, no reason whatsoever to deny
that such conceptual shifts represent truly creative achievements. Hence, if
comparable forms of innovation or conceptual restructuring are also found
in artists’ work, these should evidently enjoy pride of place in our accounts
of artistic creativity. It follows that given any suitable counterexample to
Boden’s account (“See: here we do not see a modification of conceptual
spaces, and still this artwork seems creative!”), she could retort that we are
simply lowering the bar for what counts as creative, and claim that the cases
with reorganization of conceptual space are nevertheless more creative.
    Let us, however, review the kinds of examples of artistic creativity that best
fit the bill for modifying, restructuring or transforming conceptual spaces.
Composer Arnold Schoenberg starts to compose music using twelve-tone
rows that regulate the pitch classes of the twelve-tone equal temperament
system by serializing their order of appearance. Film director Sergei Eisen-
stein formulates his montage technique, involving violations of spatial and
temporal continuity. Painter Jackson Pollock lays his canvas horizontally on
the floor, starting to drip paint on it without touching it directly with the
brush. Each of these cases involves a strong innovative turn – a paradigm
shift, if you will. All of them are conceptual innovations concerning the
handling of the medium. Such innovations function as suggested solutions
to the artist’s perennial problem of what to do with the medium. This is
the rationale of remarks such as Eisenstein’s “[t]o determine the essence of
montage is to solve the problem of film as such” (Taylor 1998: 95).
    Nonetheless, as artistic achievements, none of these ideas would have
been worth much without the subsequent work carried out in the respec-
tive artistic media, the successful processes of exploring the possibilities in-
herent in the suggested techniques. Accordingly, when Schoenberg famous-
ly claimed to have made a discovery which would “secure dominance for
the German music for the next hundred years” (Rufer 1959: 26), he was of
course wrong in his prediction but quite right in seeing that the discovery
was just a technical innovation, leaving the actual artistic work to be done
during the years to come. Similarly, the great majority of Pollock’s works did
not for their execution require any new conceptual restructuring of the kind
that Boden’s account calls for. By a work such as Autumn Rhythm (1950),
the major technical innovation mentioned above was already some years
behind. Hence, a theory emphasizing conceptual innovation or paradigm
shift would be likely to classify such an artwork merely as what Sternberg

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(1999) calls ‘replication’ – something that “solidifies the current state of the
field,” thus making less of a creative contribution than individual works
which at the moment of their conception truly “propel the field forward.”
Pollock’s case is especially illustrative here, because it might be reasonably
argued that during the years after his technical innovation, and up until his
death, he never managed to carry out another comparable “transformation
of conceptual space” in his work. And of course, there is nothing extraor-
dinary about this: countless other artists work in a similar manner, working
longer periods of time within the bounds of more or less stable practices or
methods that they have once established for themselves.
    The common emphasis of conceptual and/or technical achievements as
the core of artistic creativity – whether in the psychology of creativity or
in the historiography of the arts – has its mundane roots in the relative ease
with which these aspects may be discursively scrutinized. Such an emphasis
nevertheless easily leads to what Motherwell described as “vastly underrat-
ing the role of the medium.” An emphasis on conceptual shifts in artistic
style and technique diverts our focus from the artist’s interaction with her
medium – the principal basis for her own C-responses – and thus from the
key to the artistically creative character of her work. I take it that many of
Pollock’s paintings do, indeed, represent tremendous documents of creative
activity, but that this has much less to do with the art-historical innova-
tion of drip painting as such (influenced by a workshop by David Alfaro
Siqueiros already in 1936; see Naifeh, Smith 1989: 287) than with the way
in which Pollock managed to keep himself motivated to use this method
in his continuing work. In intuitively coming to understand the speed of
the movements which brought about Autumn Rhythm, one is persuaded to
believe that as selected for display by the artist, it must have included aspects
which most certainly were not calculated to the detail, and that it there-
fore must have provoked genuine C-responses in the artist himself at the
moments of its conception. In the absence of a belief in an artist’s personal
evaluative selection based on subjective experiences of uniqueness, interest,
novelty and their kin, any conceptual innovations behind the work would
remain inconsequential for our understanding of it as artistically creative.
    Indeed, mere evidence of conceptual restructuring in an art maker’s cog-
nition would not alone suffice to recommend attributing artistic creativity
to her, or to her products. This is easy to see by considering a scenario in
which such conceptual progress appears to be involved in the production of
a work, but – by analogy to the above monkey case – any adherence to the
appropriate medium is lacking. A possible scenario might be one in which
a person playing a problem-solving game on a computer would be unaware

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that the key combinations pressed on the keyboard are also simultaneously
used to calculate the coordinates for lines and colors for a series of com-
puter-aided paintings. Here, we may suppose that persistent and continuing
activity on the game would transform or restructure the person’s conceptual
spaces for this activity, gradually allowing her to achieve results on the prob-
lem-solving tasks that she wasn’t capable of achieving before. Concurrently,
due to the increasing structuredness of the pressed combinations of keys, the
paintings generated by the computer would likewise show an increasingly
coherent ‘style.’ I assume it to be rather obvious that one would nonetheless
hesitate attributing artistic creativity to the player, and that this is because
the player, being completely unaware of the generation and existence of the
paintings, would neither have displayed any subjective responses to them,
nor could she then have selected them to be presented as artworks on the
basis of such responses.
    Such counterexamples to Boden’s view may seem unfair – after all, no
one would seriously suspect that a theorist of creativity would want to
attribute painterly creativity to a person who is not even aware that she
is painting! However, the point is that as long as creative achievement is
defined in terms of conceptual restructuring, artistic creativity remains es-
sentially realizable without an intentional adherence to a medium. Such a
definition of artistic creativity relegates the medium to the role of a conduit
transferring the results of the creator’s problem-solving activity to the out-
side reality. Identifying the highest degrees of creative achievement in the
history of the arts with the most apparent technical paradigm shifts has the
danger of reducing the creative activity to a cognitive process that is wholly
under the artist’s control. This is to overlook the constitutive role of the
medium both in shaping the creative products and in giving impulses to the
artists that fundamentally ground our attributions of creativity to them and
their works.


5. Non-Improvisatory Processes, Precompositional Rules, and Concep-
   tual Plans

    Examples such as Pollock might seem tendentious. It may, indeed, be
conceivable that the artist undergoes subjective experiences of novelty, sur-
prise, or originality while engaging in freely improvisatory works executed
without precise goals, plans, rules, or recipes. However, in what sense does
it make sense to require that all artistic activity would ideally involve art-
ists’ subjective C-responses? What about art that does not result from rapid

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sequences of improvisatory action but rather from lengthy processes of hon-
ing and polishing, correction and revision? What about art that results from
manipulating materials according to precompositionally fixed rules? What
about art in which work in the medium is reduced to completely teleologi-
cal execution of already finished plans or ideas? In responding to these three
questions, I will argue that improvisation indeed forms a paradigm case for
the view of creativity outlined above, but that the gist of this view is inde-
pendent from the question of precompositional rules, and presupposed as an
evaluative standard even in teleological art-making processes.
    First, on the question concerning long processes of improvement, modi-
fication and amendment, it is of course to be expected that making some-
thing slowly, with a lot of conscious consideration, tends to take away some
of the surprise element arising in quick, improvisatory situations. However,
it should be remarked that the value of experiencing revelation – and thus
novelty or surprise – in a process of artistic inquiry has also sometimes been
presented as the reason why the making of artworks should not be improvi-
satory. The poet Mark Doty (2010), for example, espouses lengthy processes
of investigation into the “charged complexities lying within” the poem,
evading too early resolutions. Despite thus distinguishing sharply between
the finished work and the poet’s process of uncertainty preceding its fina-
lization, he believes that the resulting work can “involve us in a replication
of the writer’s struggle of coming to understand” (Doty 2010: 78). Here, ex-
periences of sudden resolution of conflict or feelings of revealing discovery
that the artist may encounter while making the work are not at all taken to
be diminished by prolonging the process, but perhaps even strengthened by
it. Furthermore, Doty seems to imply that some of the effectiveness of the
work lies in the audience’s ability to grasp both the artist’s struggle and the
way this has yielded to subjective experiences of insight. Such an attitude
clashes with the suggestion that our belief in the artist’s own C-responses
should necessarily depend on whether or not an artwork suggests improvi-
satoriness or speed of composition.
    Perhaps what should be said here is that improvisation, in the general
sense of continuing poietic action in real time without corrections, simply
offers one of the most feasible ways to make it almost self-evident that the
artist invites subjective C-responses. These responses may occur in non-
improvisatory poietic processes as well, but here the emphasis may gradually
tend to shift – by analogy to what happens in problem-solving creativity –
from the artist’s own subjective C-responses to her interest in ones shown
by the audience. In this respect, real-time improvisation in a medium does


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provide a useful model situation for distinguishing artistic creativity from
problem-solving creativity.
   Second, with regard to precompositionally set rules it should be noted
that such rules not only regulate certain aspects of the work, but that they
also typically cause unexpected situations challenging the artist amidst the
art-making process. As an example one could again evoke Schoenberg’s
method of twelve-tone composition. Any student of musical composition
will know that preordering the twelve pitch-classes of the western tone
system and more or less adhering to this row while actually writing out the
composition (with all due allowances for transposition, inversion, and retro-
version), presents the composer with a continuous series of small problem-
solving situations. These situations may well be rather surprising, apart from
of course requiring solutions that should in some sense be new to the com-
poser who wants to write new music. Indeed, the mere fact that an external
row table has to be consulted for designing a continuation for a given mu-
sical passage guarantees that at the moment of consultation the composer
receives an impulse that is foreign to what she is already musically presented
with in the passage just finished. The process of composition thus turns out
to be a continuous series of fruitful states of conflict in which some balance
has to be struck between the dictates of the precompositionally selected
guidelines and what appeals to the composer’s musical sense. If so, the work
requires openness to solutions that resolve such conflict situations in fresh
and original ways – that is, it requires sensitivity to one’s own C-responses.
   Described on this level, the serial composer’s predicament is in fact quite
similar to what takes place in numerous traditions of improvised music that
are based on embellishing or varying previously existing ‘models’ such as
traditional melodies or chord progressions. As suggested by ethnomusicolo-
gist Bruno Nettl (1974), it is in fact conceivable that traditional cultures of
musical improvisation might be comparatively analyzed by way of examin-
ing how creative musicians add improvised elements to the ‘non-improvised’
parts provided by their respective models. For understanding the creativity
in play, however, the task presented by the models to the creative musician
does not simply consist in adding some elements to what is already fixed,
but rather in resolving the constantly shifting subjective tensions between
her current musical statements and the dictates of a given model. The core
of the creative dynamics is not therefore completely revealed by analyzing
the finalized musical products with a view to how the previously given
elements end up being spread in the musical texture or mixed with other
materials. Far from only representing what is ‘predictable’ in the music, the
model invigorates the creative situation by providing hurdles that have to

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be overcome, constraints against which the artist’s real-time actions rub and
have to be coordinated. As improbable as the comparison may seem, the
creative artists in many of world’s improvisatory music cultures are faced
with a situation not unlike the one found in the most constructive tradi-
tions of 20th century modernist composition: in both cases, it is exactly the
previously given rules or materials that guarantee a continuing affordance
for the artist’s subjective C-responses. What is suggested by such examples,
then, is that whether or not some artistic activity is usually conceptualized
as improvisation, the presence of precompositionally determined materials
or rules should not in principle diminish the expectation concerning artists’
subjective C-responses.
    Third, and finally, what about art making in which the process of pro-
ducing the work of art is strictly teleological, following a finished plan? In
such cases, what is previously given does not confine itself to materials or
rules constraining an open-ended art-making process, but the end result
itself is in some important sense already given in the plan. Many examples
could be given especially from conceptual art, but let us consider Alfredo
Jaar’s One Million Finnish Passports in which he perceptively commented
Finland’s stringent immigration policy by exhibiting the said number of
empty Finnish passports that could have belonged to new immigrants but
didn’t. As presented in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki in
1995, the work simply consisted of a pile of one million passports. Now,
there is no need to deny the importance of statements made through such
works or their place in the art world, but it is no less clear that the artist’s
political statement did not so much emerge from the final installation than
it was simply announced through it. A work such as this gives the artistic
medium the role of realizing or communicating an antecedently finished
conception, statement, or question, quite like a factory gives a realization
to an inventor’s idea. Imagining artistic institutions erected merely on such
practices is to imagine that they would function on the model of a science
museum, a church, or an exhibition of political emblems.
    All this is well known and not very controversial. Importantly, however,
not only is there a sense in which the audience can equally get the message
of One Million Finnish Passports whether or not they actually see the work,
but the same must pertain to the artist himself. As the idea of the work
eclipses the medium through which it is projected, the work’s execution is
relegated to an instrumental role in conveying the message. This challenges
the sincerity requirement, because it is not clear that what is actually presented
is what the artist has experienced as valuable due to his own C-responses.
For all we know, his message does not really inhere in the medium. I assume,

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however, that conceptual artists are much better aware of this tension, using
it to their effect, than some creativity researchers may be. In locating artistic
creativity in conceptual achievement, a creativity researcher may seem to
be well fitted to recognize the worth of works such as One Million Finnish
Passports. I would argue, however, that even the conceptual achievement of
a conceptual artist couldn’t be appropriately evaluated except against the
background of the general expectation of a sincere artist working in a me-
dium.
    In articulating the sincerity requirement I am thus observing that despite
the “crisis in [the] medium-based conception of the artwork” (Osborne
1999: 49) that critics sometimes have seen in conceptual art, the crisis has
not really been very severe: judging by the amounts of medium-based art
(novels, paintings, compositions, films etc.) produced during the outbreak of
conceptual art, there was never a very good reason to fear that the art world
would come to forsake the idea of a sincere artist working in a medium. In-
deed, the ‘crisis’ in question seems to have been not quite unlike the notori-
ous ‘crisis of tonality’ in music history that generations of musicologists have
been taught to associate with the music of Schoenberg and other modernist
composers of the early 20th century – a description only feasible today by
disregarding the very real possibility that most of world’s tonal compositions
might actually have been written after that time, and the fact that most mu-
sic heard by most people today is, for all practical purposes, tonal. The role
of the medium in artistic creativity is, I think, not a tendency or vogue that
is easily overthrown by ‘crises’ achieved through conceptual reorganization.


6. Conclusion

   In this article, the view of a sincere, medium-attacking artist has not been
advanced as a criterion for the definition of art, but rather as a regulative
ideal that is multifariously grounded in artists’ own attitudes, audiences’ re-
actions, the practices of the art world(s), as well as – one might add – in the
human animal’s natural interest in forming and organizing his world. Belief
in the sincere human being presenting her puzzlement in the face of the
world as she encounters it in her chosen medium is an important reason for
our interest in art, inviting us to open ourselves to the same challenge.
   The view developed here acknowledges the problem-solving aspects in-
herent in artistic developments, but gives them only a subsidiary role in ac-
counting for what is most characteristic to creativity in art. Understanding
the conceptual rationale or the technical underpinnings of an artwork may,

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of course, be of huge importance for understanding the artist’s approach as
a response to an art-historical problem situation. However, artistic creativ-
ity as we know and value it is as non-reducible to holistic solutions to the
problem of approaching the artistic materials as it is to concepts or ideas
that the artist sets out to convey through the artwork. The relative ease of
identifying, labeling, and discursively scrutinizing such aspects makes them
tempting reference points for attributions of creativity, but the danger is
to reduce artworks to translatable propositional contents or solutions to
problems. Creative breakthroughs in overall artistic approach may certainly
resemble scientific breakthroughs in that they often represent novel ‘biso-
ciations’ between hitherto separate ideas, techniques, or frames of reference
(cf. Koestler 1964). What really drives artistic creativity forward, however, is
the friction experienced on a smaller scale – the simultaneous ‘bisociation’
of any single gesture or idea both with the artist’s subjective sensibility and
experience as well as with the constraints set and surprises provided by her
objective medium.
    Roland Barthes (1994: 494) famously claimed that to give a text an au-
thor is tantamount to providing it with a final signified, or to ‘closing the
writing.’ However, this is only true if we assume the author to come fully
equipped with determinate intentions that impose a ‘standard of correct-
ness’ (cf. Wollheim 1980: 205) on our subsequent interpretations. In fact,
there is no reason to treat the author only that way. In the view developed
above, it is exactly the presence of the artistically creative author that guaran-
tees an ineliminable non-fixity to works of art. The institutions and prac-
tices of art are erected on the expectation that the artist herself will time and
again become amazed, attracted, aroused, and awed by what takes place in
her medium, and her choice to publicly share the results of being in such a
non-closural state is what is often most valued in her work. To find the au-
thor stumbling in her irreducibly recalcitrant medium, relying on her own
limited perspective, is not to close the writing but to open it to even those
understandings that she could never have conceived of.

                                                             huovinen@umn.edu




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