Scream, create or die!!

I should've made clearer that my antipathy to creative (or maybe 'creative') *people* is occasional, contextual, and *my problem*. But I think the question of what creativity means and whether it's over-valued in some respects is kind of an interesting one beyond my own personal bugbears.

(I nodded a lot while reading Ellie's posts.)

The idea of creativity for its own sake - of art as something without purpose - is fairly recent. It's born, surely, out of the same spirit of individualism which animates (or has been co-opted into animating) the money-oriented society that is often cast as creativity's enemy. Pre-capitalist and non-capitalist societies have traditionally been suspicious or dismissive of art which wasn't designed to improve in some religious or social sense. How do we disentangle the romantic and the capitalist threads - if, that is, we need to?

And if there is a social pressure to be creative, is it something that's being encouraged in place of a social pressure to be collective?

I tend to use my creativity as a way of feeling better about not having much in the way of an outgoing personality..

I was going to make some sweeping claims about creativity being bound up with modernist projects of the self and self-realisation in an age of atomistic individualism, and about what this might mean for relational concepts of identity and for a more social or collective idea of culture. It would've been rubbish and probably included some idiot claim that over-inflated ideas of creativity lead to Elizabeth Wurtzel, so I'm glad Tom's pointed this out more eloquently. Tom, and anyone else who does mainly music criticism/journalism/commentary or whatever, do you think what you do is creative?

Ellie you are right on, sister!

"I said that to me no art is a waste of space. It's cars, roads, suburbs, wheat fields, and the sea which are a waste of space!

(Especially the sea. Oh, and the whole of space is a waste of space too.)"

i like the sea better than i like most music.