Scream, create or die!!

X = X, ergo we can all go home.

Never felt it in really overwhelming terms, but more than once from family and others there was the hint that I should be doing more with my writing in terms of fiction, though to be more accurate I was the one who put the pressure on myself more over time. So when I wrote the novel, it was interesting to have that small monkey off my back.

I put myself under pressure because I have a tendency to believe if you (meaning me, really) don't creatively produce something, you're worthless and a waste of space. I tend not to use this as a conversation starter.

Read Oblomov.

I think there are certain (sub)cultural circles in which the reification of creativity per se is almost nauseating, and sometimes I feel the complete inverse of e.sound of j. in this respect: like I think that if you *do* creatively produce something, or at least bang on tejusly about it, you're worthless and a waste of space. That's the really tetchy and mean-spirited version, obv., and no offence intended. Ppl who exclusively self-identify with their creative endeavours whilst simultaneously confining 'creativity' to a few spheres that they think are important upset me. Conversely, the idea of creativity as *always* intrinsically important and everywhere worthwhile becomes wholly banal, doesn't it? I bet Alanis Morisette (random eg) feels it's *very* important that she's 'creative' in everything she does. The notion of creativity is just one of the ways we invent or extend ourselves (and you might add that it's one that fits happily with some dominant discourses around producing effective and productive selves these days; the portfolio career, the flexible worker, the importance of the cultural worker to post-modern economies, and so on). So I'm wondering:

Is creativity of itself a worthwhile/ultimate value, whatever we may think of what's created?

Why reduce the notion of 'creativity' to what is *produced*? Isn't that a reduction of a potentially rich notion to a banal means-ends equation? You can think creatively, talk creatively, live your life creatively, all that stuff that mostly eludes the radar - can't you? Maybe this is just another way of saying that everyone's necessarily creative *anyway*, and that hiving off the bits relating to certain kinds of art and cultural practice is a rhetorical maneouvre that isn't as democratising as it might first appear but in fact practices a kind of elitism?

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.