When “Creative” Became a Noun
Art, Business, and the People In-between
“Why was I in graduate school? I wasn’t at all sure. I thought I would like to teach; but I also felt that if I didn’t become an artist I would die.”
When I was sixteen years old, I decided that I’d have to write if I wanted to keep living. My well-being was not being threatened. I was not sick or dying. I just knew that if I didn’t do something differently I would suffer a fate worse than death. I would become boring. I would become normal, whatever that is. I would find myself in a brightly lit office building one day, with a mug of hot coffee in hand and a mind undone by worry over my mortgage and my unmanageable blood pressure.
There would be nothing wrong with my office job. The pay would be decent. My coworkers would like me. Maybe I’d even have stock options and an office with a view of the skyline. But deep in the primitive regions of my psyche I would know that I was supposed to be doing something else.
I am an artist.
I’m probably not a very good artist, but I’m an artist because I’ve decided to be one. At this point in my life, I don’t think I can be anything else without being miserable.
Recently, on the internet and beyond, I’ve seen the word “creative” being used as a noun to describe a specific type of person: the creative professional. While I can forgive the business world for its love affair with acronyms and brevity for brevity’s sake, especially in the tech industry, something about this new adoption of the word “creative” is making me uncomfortable.
First, it’s a strange use of language. “Creative” wants to be an adjective. That is why it ends in “-ive”. Would you ever refer to one of your colleagues as an “inventive”? I suppose you could. What about a “descriptive” or a “supportive”? Let’s use one of these words as a noun in a sentence and see how it looks:
“Our business copy is lacking in description. Call up the temp agency and we’ll hire some descriptives to fix our description problem.”
Second, I have to wonder what “creatives” were before they were designated as such. I’m assuming that most of them called themselves “designers”, “writers”, “animators”, or even “coders”, but for whatever reason these labels were not efficient enough so they were all lumped into a single category. More importantly, how many of these “creatives” previously considered themselves “artists”?
Surely, many of them studied one of the humanities or the Arts. I doubt that their life’s ambition was to become “a creative” but now, I suppose, that is what they are valued for.
From my perspective, being called “a creative” is like being referred to as a functioning cog in a larger mechanism.
For example, a business needs someone to design the banner on their website so they hire some “creatives” to do it. This website banner is not exactly an art object because it functions as a tool for enticing clients to invest more time on the website and, hopefully, form relationships with the business that will generate more revenue.
Yet, that website banner was designed by someone who is skilled in creative means and mediums and he or she is, in fact, creating something.
Isn’t it art?
The very fact that the creation of colorful banners needs to be outsourced to another department or another company implies that no one else in the office was capable of creating such a thing. It required the touch of someone with a different type of skill set than the other people in the office, someone with talent.
If Tom from Accounting could have designed the banner on his lunch break at no extra cost, the company would have gone with Tom to save a buck or two. But Tom doesn’t know jack about the software and his choice in fonts is repugnant, so the company pays some “creatives” to make the banner, or, if you prefer, the company pays some artists to make it.
What about writing? Business copy can hardly be considered art, but consider the business writer as an individual. She probably has an English degree, which means she’s read Shakespeare. Maybe she enrolled in a few creative writing workshops in school but decided to give up creative writing after she graduated because, let’s face it, creative writing doesn’t pay the rent unless you are particularly gifted at it.
So this poor business writer has given up on her dream of becoming the next J.K. Rowling and settled for an office job with the hope that she can continue to write short stories in her free time. But her free time is always taken up by the extra business copy she has to pump out to keep her job and, when that isn’t the case, she is usually so exhausted from work that she would rather sit around in pajama pants and watch Netflix than produce anything literary or artful. The Artist’s Spirit that once sat at the throne of her soul drains out of her, bit by bit, until there is nothing left of her but the haggard shell of a woman who once, in her budding youth, could have been the literary artist of a generation.
She knows she is an artist. She feels it in her marrow, and yet she is now being labelled “a creative”, because that is her function, her designation.
Obviously, people who don’t consider themselves “creative” need a name for people who do. There is nothing wrong with being a creative professional and not an artist, and perhaps you can be both at the same time, but whenever I see “creative” being used as a noun, I feel a piece of my internal wiring snap.
I picture a locked room on the 57th floor of a New York skyscraper that is filled with computers and people in chains; and the people are force-fed coffee and doughnuts every hour and told to produce mass amounts of copy, images, video, and email for the benefit of The Company (with a capital C).
And on the door to that room on the 57th floor is a small, black placard with stenciled writing in bold, white letters that says:
CREATIVES
