The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History by Samuel W. Franklin, and: The Creativity Complex: Art, Tech, and the Seduction of an Idea by Shannon Steen (review)

Reviewed by:

• The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History by Samuel W. Franklin, and: The Creativity Complex: Art, Tech, and the Seduction of an Idea by Shannon Steen
• Stina Teilmann-Lock (bio)

The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History
By Samuel W. Franklin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Pp. 253. The Creativity Complex: Art, Tech, and the Seduction of an Idea
By Shannon Steen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023. Pp. xi + 246.

Creativity is encouraged in everyone, except accountants. Accountancy aside, society seemingly cannot have enough of creativity. According to the World Economic Forum’s The Future of Jobs Report 2023, the second most sought-after skill of employers is “creative thinking” (out sought only by “analytical thinking”). Two recent volumes, Samuel W. Franklin’s The Cult of Creativity and Shannon Steen’s The Creativity Complex, explore the roles and exploitations of creativity in the United States. Both monographs historicize the notion of creativity (in line with recent scholarship such as A. Reckwitz, The Invention of Creativity, 2017; T. Beyes and J. Metelmann (eds.), The Creativity Complex, 2018; W. P. McCray, Making Art Work, 2020) and shed light on the ways in which creativity, over the past century, has been instrumentalized, commercialized, and promoted as a solution to problems ranging from boredom in school to sales optimization and ecosystem collapse.

In the United States, creativity research has been a big deal in psychology and business studies since the mid-twentieth century, as such well funded by, among other sources, public money. Research outcomes have included “creativity tests,” psychometrics of “highly creative” individuals, “divergent thinking,” methods for “creative problem-solving,” fostering of “creative thinking” across industries, and more (see V. Glăveanu, The Creativity Reader, 2019).

In The Cult of Creativity, Samuel W. Franklin points to the paradoxical character of the notion of creativity. It is commonplace and sublime; it makes work less alienating while it optimizes workers’ performance; it encompasses both Don Draper and Louise Bourgeois. Creativity is the darling of management gurus and starving artists alike. Franklin, elegantly, submits that the contradictory character of the concept of creativity is its special force: it reconciles tensions between the “individual and mass society, the extraordinary and the everyday, the spiritual and the crassly material, the rebellious and the status quo” (p. 7). The notion of creativity has become a lens for us to [End Page 1030] see social change in a particular light and to come to terms with deep-seated tensions of contemporary society. In nine chapters, Franklin’s book presents manifestations, uses, and usefulness of “creativity.” We are presented with the role of Ellis Paul Torrance, an educational psychologist and creator of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, in the reconfiguring, from the 1960s onward, of the American school system toward supporting the “creative child.” Embracing creativity in education promised to unleash individual abilities of children to become Nobel laureates, or at least happy workers.

Franklin points to how Abraham Maslow saw the real potential of creativity as a means for “self-actualization.” (Maslow prescribed hard sciences for men and more domestic forms of self-actualization for women.) Management thinkers picked up Maslow’s ideas and gave us the (received) idea of the coming together of happy employees and happy bottom lines. The creative revolution on Madison Avenue was yet another manifestation of the power of the concept of creativity: the advertising industry gained its identity as a creator of cultural and social value (advertising has taught us to “think different” and “just do it,” or at least to pretend to).

While the strength of Franklin’s argument is its unraveling of the many hidden and contradictory assumptions and their trajectories that are brought into play every time we call upon creativity, its weakness is the disillusion that threatens to hit after the tearing apart of such a cherished “thing” as creativity. A certain scholarly freeze arises from exposing the notion of creativity as only a product, or a construct, of a particular societal arrangement at a given time. Once the scales have fallen from our eyes, how do we approach creativity? Franklin suggests in his conclusion that the concept of creativity is a...