What has happened to creativity?

December 16th, 2009

Something has happened to Britain’s creative community and there’s no better way to understand this than to go back to a speech that Graham Greene, one of the most admired novelists of his day, gave in Germany in 1969 “on the virtue of disloyalty”.

Writes, Robert McCrum, And he introduces us to Greene’s theory on the true role of culture,

Responding to being awarded the distinguished Shakespeare prize, Greene used the occasion to extol the writers and artists for whom he had the most respect, those who by their calling were “troublers of the poor world’s peace”. Pointedly, he identified that bourgeois Stratfordian, William Shakespeare, Gent, as an establishment poet for whom he had little sympathy. Instead, with perverse glee, he praised “the sulphurous anger of Dante, the self-disgust of Baudelaire, and the blasphemies of Villon”, noting with approval that their fates involved traumatic exile, an obscenity trial and the threat of hanging.

From there, in the depths of the cold war, it was a short step to Dostoevsky before a firing squad, the persecution of Sinyavsky and the sufferings of Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag. Then he went back to Shakespeare. Two years before he wrote those complacent lines, “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”, in Richard II, says Greene, Shakespeare’s fellow poet, Southwell, had died on the scaffold after three years of torture. “If only Shakespeare had shared his disloyalty,” Greene writes, “we could have loved him better as a man.” Shakespeare had funked his obligation to challenge the state and was somehow diminished by his willingness to let “the state poison the psychological wells”.

This is a very interesting article, as it does ask the question of the role of creativity in today’s world. I watched every show of the X-Factor for my sins, and thoroughly enjoyed it. However, I also remember dropping to my knees at the Bauhaus museum a few years back (in a we’re not worthy moment) whilst on a commercial shoot for client as I had been heavily influenced by the creators of modernism in my early 20′s as I began my commercial communications career. Creativity and culture, new culture, is there to ask questions, its how we bring uncomfortable and new ideas into the world – by default it is subversive. It was Marcel Duchamp that perhaps first questioned the modern age with his urinal – I call it art, it is he said.

Apart from the passionate démarches of the late Harold Pinter, there have been precious few equivalent moments of risk since the burning of The Satanic Verses in Bradford. Rushdie himself has become reintegrated into a literary community notable for its indifference to illegal wars, clandestine torture and the state-sponsored oppression of human rights. Until the recession of 2008-09, the creative community, like the world at large, gorged itself on a diet of unsustained credit, merrily cashing the blank cheques of intellectual bankruptcy.

This cascade of money has brought with it a dismal retinue of lesser evils: prizes, fellowships, conferences, festivals and, worst of all, the fatal seduction of unfettered applause. Success is all very well, no doubt, and maybe it does, in the words of the cliché, breed success. But it also sponsors complacency and an appetite for entertainment, sapping the instinct to ask awkward questions of the status quo.

And within this context perhaps, we have greatest movement, the biggest grass roots movement in which, as Joseph Beuys argued we are all artists. In doing so he once opened the doors of an art school to anyone who wanted to come along and soon found himself, uninvited. But this movement questions everything – it questions the power relationships that describe how we relate to each other, to organisations, the media and even the state. That is the networked society, where; YouTube uploads 20 hours of audio-visual content of every minute of every day, creativity is exploding but not within what we call, conventional channels. The artists of tomorrow are coming from elsewhere. Although McCrum rages against the machine that creates “culture”, the real battle of consequence I suggest lies , and, is happening elsewhere.

In conclusion, the dreadful cultural cost of complicity is simply stated. If disloyalty encourages the writer to roam at will through human hearts and minds, and gives the novelist a fourth dimension of sympathy and intuition, then complicity just narrows the creative arteries. It propagates a me-too-ism in the community that works against originality and promotes a wannabe mentality that has nothing to do with Ezra Pound’s famous injunction to “make it new”.

Such lowered standards extend to the media, too: journalists following other journalists, like sheep; reviewers schmoozed by PRs; the newspaper commentariat looking over its shoulder, as it did in the run-up to the Iraq war. The complicity of all artists makes them fearful of risk, vulnerable to propaganda, and the prisoners of conventional wisdom. Disloyalty liberates, complicity enslaves.

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