The Painting at the MoMA
Creativity is impossible to define. It’s elusive and can be encapsulated or explained in countless different ways. Creativity is innovation. Creativity is originality. Creativity is disruption. But that’s not all: Creativity is so much more.
“It’s impossible to explain creativity. It’s like asking a bird, ‘How do you fly?’ You just do.” — Eric Jerome Dickey (Novelist).
According to Robert Bilder, a psychology professor at UCLA, although creativity does require “novelty, innovation, and disruption on the one hand,” it cannot be completely unpredictable, disorderly and up to one’s imagination.
Rather, for a creative endeavor to be successful, “there has to be the imposition of sufficient order to make it of interest, value, or acceptability to the users, whomever they may be.” Indeed, there is a line that creatives cross into “a state that others are not going to appreciate” if they let their works veer into complete unpredictability (think: that piece of contemporary art that leaves you utterly confused or unsettled).
For this reason, Bilder argues that for a given creative piece or endeavor to be creatively successful, it must “resonate strongly” with at least one community or system of thought. Once again, this brings back in the concept of utility. Even a painting, which has no functional purpose or utility per se, will not be successfully creative unless it serves an aesthetic function for its owners. In other words, even though something, such as a painting, is a form of creative expression, the final product is not necessarily truly creative.
For me, this statement conjures the memory of being 10 years old on a rainy afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Being 10 in a new city at the end of a long day of sight-seeing within a forest of skyscrapers, you can imagine that I was feeling a tad bit tired. As I begrudgingly dragged my feet from painting to painting, I could not muster the energy to listen to what the stout tour guide was saying.
We turned the corner into the following room. I was expecting to find another set of peaceful pointillism or impressionism paintings. But no. All I could see was a large blue canvas probably twice my size, hundreds of visitors flocking around it, “ooh”- ing and “aaah”-ing. (For reference, it was a painting titled “Blue Monochrome” by Yves Klein. See below).
I stopped and stared at the painting. I frowned, pursing my lips. I was confused. I was upset. I was indignant. My 10-year-old self thought, “Why is this painting featured in one of the biggest rooms at the MoMA? Why do they even call this art? Why is everyone so obsessed with this thing?” At least with Monet or Matisse paintings, I could understand the scenes. There were people with recognizable emotions. Peaceful scenes in gardens or by the river. Vibrant colors. But this blue canvas, this painting, was just a pot of blue paint strewn over a white canvas. Anyone could have made it. This wasn’t art. This wasn’t creativity. This was just blue. Just blue, nothing else.
In retrospect, that painting was creative because it did have an aesthetic function, even if it did not appeal to my 10-year old self. For my younger self, this piece was not a manifestation of creativity according to Robert Bilder’s terms because it was not something that I appreciated. Today, however, I would appreciate the large blue canvas and would consider it to be creative because I personally do believe it has an aesthetic value.
Ultimately, Bilder’s understanding of creativity is intriguing, because it leaves creativity up to subjective judgement. Maybe a given piece of art doesn’t resonate with me but resonates with the next person. So does that make it un-creative to me, yet creative to the next person?
This conception blurs the line of what we can consider useful or valuable, as it relates to creativity, as the “label” of creative is left in the hands of the subjective viewer. We can’t define creativity through objective standards, as two people might respond completely differently to creativity. Creativity remains a subjective phenomenon. For a great read about the subjectivity of creativity, check out this last article:
For more information, please contact me at sfd9@georgetown.edu. To read more, you can purchase my book, “When Birds Swim” on Amazon in paperback or Kindle.
