Marketing creativity as a commodity

Some years ago I asked a well-known Australian writing teacher to write an article for The Age on how she taught creativity in her classes.

She looked perplexed and then said she could write an article on the importance of social interaction in creative writing classes but she did not teach students how to be creative.

That story came back to me on a hot summer evening ripping vines off the roof of my house on the north coast of New South Wales.

Can creativity be taught?

The question can’t be answered from current curriculums in universities. They provide the courses and resources for students but they do not teach anything about creativity or the creative process. Universities build “3D creative games incubators” or “design labs” but these are institutional cages where they hope creativity will happen, much like putting pandas in a zoo and hoping they will mate.

We know creativity when we see or hear it. To coin a phrase from the 1970s, it has the shock of the new, or it is elegant or beautiful.

Yet after 12 years of study I cannot say that I know how the creative process works. Some of the greatest art I have ever seen was produced by schizophrenics and five-year-old children - and more kudos to them.

Writers on creativity usually avoid trying to define what creativity is and instead specify particular types and degrees of creativity.

American academic Richard Florida, for example, identifies a "super-creative core" within the creative class to distinguish those who "fully engage in the creative process". What ever that is.

Included in this category are scientists, engineers, poets, novelist, artists, entertainers, designers, architects, non-fiction writers, editors, researchers and software programmers. Yet this is still too broad to be useful. Is the creativity of a poet really the same as that of an engineer?

What Florida refers as the creative class is essentially a new name for knowledge workers born from post industrial technological change.

US sociologist Daniel Bell in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society back in 1973 argued that knowledge would become the primary driver of economic prosperity.

Florida goes further than Bell and makes the same erroneous claim that many university schools also make and that is "the ultimate intellectual property - the one that really replaces land, labour and capital as the most valuable human resource - is the human creative faculty".

This is silly. Although the organisation of land, labour and capital is certainly different in today's economy as compared with the past, they're no less valuable or important than before.

One of the reasons academics and others “over egg” the importance of creativity is that they either implicitly or explicitly believe that creativity can be appropriated or taught and nowhere is this attitude most prevalent than in the “creative industries”.

In the mid 1990s the term creative industries, fresh from Blair’s UK, was making the rounds of the university media schools. QUT was first off the mark with it’s innovative but now outdated suite of creative industries curriculums.

Basically the idea was to allow students to pick and choose their subjects in the arts and humanities. So for example, students would do a photography major and concurrently study a range of subjects such as multimedia and creative writing and try import these ideas in to a new creative product.

RMIT went down the same path recently with bachelor and masters degrees in the creative industries with fees between $20,000 and $30,000. Although if you wanted to start at a diploma level and graduated with a masters degree, you’d be out of pocket to the tune of about $80,000.

That’s a lot for programs that teach you how to hold a camera or write a computer program. But they teach nothing about art theory, the creative process, the history of the creative process, aesthetics or the psychology of creativity. These subjects were buried in the 1980s by ridiculous post modernist babble.

It’s clear that when university teachers and marketers talk about creativity what they are really talking about is another "C" word - commodification.

When I worked and lived in Fitzroy, Melbourne, I would meet many people who considered themselves “creative”. They worked on “art installations”, in “marketing” or “design”. Sometimes I’d meet hybrids - people who worked in marketing communications, web development or communication design.

Yet when pressed on what they did on a daily basis, the replies were often vague. Some said they worked as real estate copywriters, computer programmers or as visual merchandise designers. There was no shame in this but somehow, for them they had not achieved the pinnacle of “creativity” - whatever that was.

To be “creative” is to be part of a club. It connotes who we are down this end of the bar. It is clannish. To be creative has a certain social cachet and university marketers are not slow to capitalise on this. This is the commodification of creativity.

Of course the great advantage of emphasising creativity over commodification is that creativity can be made to appear as nothing more than the outcome of natural processes.

There are major errors with this thinking. One error is that completing a PhD in creative writing or photography means that the student is more creative or even smarter. It may mean that the successful doctorate student will be able to teach at a university and further indoctrinate students in to the commodification of creativity but that’s about all.

Unfortunately it’s a fact universally known but not much hawked about by university marketers, that less than 1 per cent of all students in the creative industries will be “famous” (another commodification term) by completing a university degree.

And contrary to popular opinion, corporate Australia doesn’t have much need for “creative personalities”. It has a great need for people who can think strategically, write with brevity and clarity and show up on time.

Today the trend is not for blancmange curriculums such as the creative industries has produced but for specialisations. In polite terms the convergence of mediums has not only “zapped a lot of people’s brains” but it has also created a forum where concepts such as “creativity” are opium to the masses.

Less ethical employers in the electronic games industry rely on this narcotic to get students to work 50 to 60 hours in their computer labs with the promise of fame and fortune.

Students should go back to first principles and think critically in their own fields, whether it’s photography, music or writing, rather than taking a smorgasbord approach to intellectual and vocational study.