Critical Perspectives 5: 23/10/14 -- Creativity and Authorship, with Clare Johnson

[The lectures] will be recorded (on Blackboard) along with slideshow + office hours – check it regularly! Same for UWE email)

Engagement = IMPORTANT → Show up to everything

8 weeks of lectures (with some discussion) until Christmas; after that 7 seminars

3 things:

• Blog (throughout module) → set it up between now + next Thursday; “learning log” - allows tutors to track your growth
• Poster (summary of essay) – due Feb 9th
• 1200 word essay + bibliography – March 26th → “present a detailed, critical analysis of a cultural text” (artefact) – same for everyone

Both 2pm – university standard

What comes to mind when you say “creativity?” → Comes from inside?

Part of being human – creation

There are different models of creative practitioner:

• Sole author OR collaborator
• Hybrid manager – different fields
• Facilitating something

Creativity can come from “out there”

Individual expression is relatively new – God used to be the only “creator” (our modern understanding of creativity is only about 200 years old)

(a specifically European idea – Egocentricity)

Neville Brody – hot in the 80s, but might not be today [an example of how tastes can change]

Romanticism – birth of “originality” and the artist as a genius

18^th century – art started being talked about as a separate activity from everyday life

Modernism (late 19th-early 20^th century) – avant-garde and forward-looking; experimental; separation of art and entertainment (a series of ideas rather than a style)

Post-modernism (mid-late 20^th century) – mixing high and low cultural forms; borrowing ideas (quoting from the past – retro) NOSTALGIA; rejecting norms; rewarding experimentation

David Carson – deconstruction of typography

Creative industries = putting creativity and economy together seamlessly

The culture industry – coined by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Germany in the 1930s; they were horrified by the U.S. Media (not unlike propaganda) – dangerous culture

[Adorno and Horkheimer] argued that products of mass culture were homogenous and predictable – popular culture keeps reproducing the same idea (CONFORMITY)* (and consumerism) *e.g. exclusively heterosexual love stories

ART can challenge conformity [they argued]

Adorno and Horkheimer considered consumers dupes – yet it's hard to sell things to them (advertising)

Walter Benjamin – argued that fusing art + pop culture (industry) opened culture up to a wider range of people – democratises culture (Andy Warhol played with this idea)

Same time period, but different views – people don't always agree about creativity

Consumers** are unpredictable – they make decisions

**Authors of creative content (YouTube) – the divide has collapsed

Roland Barthes – wrote the essay “Death of the Author” (1967) (look online or in the library) – critiqued the idea of focusing on the author; the unity of a text lies in its destination (reader) → radical idea at the time

They decide if it WORKS – readers act

“The birth of the reader must begin with the death of the author”