10.13135/2036-542X/7592
application/pdf
2036-542X
7592
2
en
Alessandro Bertinetto
Trópos
Creativity between Art and Philosophy
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos
4
Monografica
2012-04-01
2023-05-21
2012-04-01
2023-05-22
5-8
1
Alessandro Bertinetto
2011
10.13135/2036-542X/7592
5
Università di Udine/Freie Universität Berlin
2036-542X
2
en
8
Creativity between Art and Philosophy
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos/article/download/7592/6327
4
                                                               isbn 978-88-548-4716-3 – ISSN 2036-542X-11002
                                                                         doi 10.4399/97888548471631 – pp. 5-8




              Creativity between Art
                 and Philosophy
                           Alessandro Bertinetto
                    Università di Udine/Freie Universität Berlin




    The idea that art is related to a process of creation is a modern one.
Through a complex history in the 20th century, which is not without con-
tradictions, the connection between art and creativity was debated in differ-
ent fields – psychology, epistemology, cognitive science, etc. – and became
the target of attacks from marxism and (post-)structuralism. Still, the notion
of creativity seems to have conserved its force not only in everyday practices
but also in media discourses. In diverse areas – from art theory to epistemol-
ogy, from action theory to economics, from computer science to psychol-
ogy (to give only a few examples) – it has regained the attention of scholars
as well, as is made clear by the number of recent publications on the topic.
However, questions remain as to whether and how the notion of creativity
can be used and what kind of conceptual work it can do.
    These are difficult, yet important, philosophical matters, considering that,
from theology to art, the notion of creativity has already undergone a series
of profound transformations during modernity; most notably it ceased to
mean a production ex nihilo and began to indicate a kind of making, which
entails novelty, originality and exemplarity. From a philosophical point of
view, this evolution concerns the very meaning of the creative act. A genetic
approach, reducing creativity to a set of determined causes and grounds,
finds a corrective in those thinkers who stress its normative significance and
its performative dimension.The terms of this debate see the issue of creativ-
ity as involving general questions about our ways of acting and understand-
ing or about exclusively, or particularly, or at least characteristically, some
fields of human experience, such as the arts, and not others.
    Trópos dedicated a call for papers to this topic. Selected papers are pub-
lished in two special issues.The present one includes essays offering theoret-
ical investigations on creativity. They do this under different, even contrast-
ing, perspectives, with different aims and with different outcomes. Yet, the
light they throw on the question at issue provides readers with important,

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often creative, insights. Through them, readers are invited to think creatively,
as well as critically, on creativity and its connections with the arts and aes-
thetics.
    In the opening essay, Judith Siegmund discusses and criticizes different
explanations of creativity in order to find ways to answer to the key ques-
tion, Is There a Quintessential Meaning for the Concept of Creativity? She con-
trasts theories that consider creativity as a general feature of human action,
theories that regard creativity as compatible with rationality and art crea-
tivity as exemplary of creativity as such, and other views that criticize the
very concept of ‘creativity’ as an ideological notion: a notion used in our
capitalistic society as a means of promoting efficiency in terms of increasing
profit and adapting individual taste to mass culture. According to those con-
ceptions, the notion of creativity, detached from the connotations of genius
and inspiration and absorbed into the economic system, is ‘domesticated’ to
the extent that it covers every human activity. This is, Siegmund argues, one
of the reasons why artists nowadays reject both creativity as a paradigm for
art and art as a paradigm for creativity.
    In his paper Naturalizzare la creatività (Naturalizing Creativity), Gianluca
Consoli suggests another way of avoiding the risk of an ideological use of
the concept of creativity: its naturalization. ‘Naturalization’ does not simply
seek to explain away the concept; it hopes instead to understand the mental
processes at stake in creative actions. Hence, Consoli explores the notions
of insight and of aesthetic pleasure. They should be combined in order to get
a proper view of creativity under the perspective both of its production as
well as of its reception. Nonetheless, Consoli argues, this naturalization must
be integrated by a more comprehensive hermeneutical understanding that
takes into account the historical dimension of creativity.
    One may also be tempted to distinguish various kinds of creativity that
should be explained differently. Following this path, Chris Dowling (The
Value of Ingenuity) focuses his attention on a subclass of creative problem
solving: ingenuity. If a ‘creative’ resolution to a problem is the combination
of ideas “in a way that is original, valuable, and skilful,” ingenuity is, accord-
ing to Dowling, the capacity to recognize problems, whose creative solution
is frugal as well as riskier, quicker and more economical than the solutions
to other problems in the same “conceptual space,” “but whose payoff is of
sufficient value to warrant creatively engaging with this problem” (p. 61).
An investigation of ingenuity can provide important insights about a kind
of creativity that seems to be particularly relevant in our competitive world.
    A different, yet related, issue concerns artistic creativity. Erkki Huovinen
(On Attributing Artistic Creativity) maintains that the artistic medium is key

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                         Creativity between Art and Philosophy

for understanding artistic creativity, which cannot be viewed solely in terms
of conceptual restructuring or as problem-solving. For reducing artistic cre-
ativity to “a cognitive process that is wholly under the artist’s control” means
“to overlook the constitutive role of the medium both in shaping the crea-
tive products and in giving impulses to the artists that fundamentally ground
our attributions of creativity to them and their works” (p. 79). The medium
is hardly to be considered as a transparent tool. Rather, artists experience
tensions and surprises in response to their own works. Hence, Huovinen
argues, the uncontrollability of the medium, “far from being a defect in the
artist’s competence, is actually at the heart of what is expected of artistic
creativity” (p. 68).
    The fact that authentic, personal artists experienced “tensions, surprises,
and revelations” in response to their works, seems to give artistic creativ-
ity an improvisational touch. This is one of the reasons why it is interesting
to investigate creativity in relation to improvisation. Cesare Natoli’s paper
Improvvisazione musicale e complessità (Musical Improvisation and Complexity)
is devoted to this task and explores some of the features of collective im-
provisation. In a collective improvisation, order and disorder, planning and
chaos are inseparable. In this sense, according to Natoli, it can be framed
analogously to biologically and physically complex systems, where the con-
text is continuously transformed and re-created, and the self-regulating bal-
ance between order and chaos is achieved through the mutual relation of
the parts. The epistemology of complexity provides aesthetic investigations
with an understanding of the importance of the unforeseen as well as an
understanding of how to bridge the divide between science and artistic
production.
    Still, what are the implications of creativity for the ontology of artworks
and for their definition? In his paper Questa è arte, quella non è arte. Le con-
seguenze ontologiche della creatività (This is Art, that is not Art: Ontological Con-
sequences of Creativity), Enrico Terrone argues that creativity is primarily as-
cribed to acts and events, not to things or objects. Against structuralism
and contextualism, Terrone defends performativism, and he maintains that
artworks are acts in which the artist plays a crucial role, although he/she ex-
ercises no absolute control over them. Moreover, the evaluation of artworks
depends very much on their creative achievements. At the end of the paper,
this view is exemplified by considering the special case of films.
    Yet, there could also be good reasons for defending some improved ver-
sions of contextualism. According to Jerrold Levinson (Indication, Abstraction,
and Individuation), contextualism holds true, if some of its weaknesses are
overcome. The view of artworks as types, embraced by Levinson himself

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                               Alessandro Bertinetto

in the past, must be abandoned, because works of art have aesthetic and
artistic properties “that they could not have were they pure structures exist-
ing atemporally” (p. 122). So, according to Levinson, artworks are not pure
abstract structures: they are rather impure, individual structures, which are
created by the artist, who, by ‘indicating’ artworks, provides them with aes-
thetic, expressive and semantic properties. Hence, the idea of artworks as
‘indicated structures’ can be defended by understanding artistic indications
as singular psychological acts that christen artworks in definite historical
contexts.
    The papers that have been summarized offer multifaceted theoretical ac-
counts of creativity. The next issue of Trópos will tackle the topic from a dif-
ferent perspective by exploring the history for creativity and examining the
ways in which individual philosophers and artists have approached the topic.

                                                       alessandro.bertinetto@uniud.it




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