The shifting nature of creative judgment

early draft

As we know, the judgment of how creative something is is relative and changes across time. Something is only "new" and "creative" for a while. Everyday creativity ages rapidly. Inspired creativity has more of an impact and lasts longer than everyday creativity. Transcendent creativity--when it is eventually successful-- has the greatest impact and staying power. Even wildly radical creativity will, in time, however, become the normalized convention or standard against which new creativity is judged. In 1917, for example, Marcel Duchamp jumped past creating paintings and sculpture altogether and simply asserted the label of "art object" for a manufactured porcelain urinal. This was a radical expansion of the definition of "art"--many new things could now be included in the "set" of art (e.g., like a dead cow floating in a huge tank of formaldehyde). From this point of view, radically creative artists like Van Gogh and Picasso began to look a little less creative and radical for working within such "traditional" forms of art. Most artists at the time rejected Duchamp's radical redefinition of art. Today it seems fairly conventional. And so it goes. Let's look at a less artistic and more left-brained example of the difference between inspired and radical creativity and the transitory and relative nature of creativity judgments. Newtonian physics was a radical creative leap that dramatically expanded the power of physics to explain and predict physical events in our world and in the heavens above. Quantum physics came along a hundred years later and provided a radically creative and radically different view of our world. Compared to the new, wild view provided by Quantum physics, Newtonian physics now started looking and feeling a little old-fashioned and mechanical--like an old Swiss watch. The notion that progress in science has been as much revolutionary (radical shifts in explanatory paradigms) as evolutionary was popularized by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A radical and controversial notion at the time--and radically creative in its own right--this concept itself has also now become part of conventional wisdom. Wherever human creativity has been applied, we find evolution and revolution. And radical creativity becomes inspired creativity becomes the boring conventional standard from which we will seek creative relief.