Creativity in art
I’m reading The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. Her thesis is that creativity comes from the Creator, and the book’s subtitle is “A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity”. I think this is totally wrong.
It’s true that we use the same word, “creator”, for both artists and gods, but it does not follow that artists and gods do the same sort of thing. The Genesis story is “Let there be light”. There are no preliminary sketches, no outlines, no rough drafts, no prototypes, no models… the Creation was definitely not the work of an Artist.
If we focus on the adjective, “creative”, it’s clear that evolution is a much better model of the creative process. Evolution builds on what has gone before, and introduces new ideas in the form of mutations. Genetic combination tries out many, many ideas at the same time, and natural selection culls the ones that don’t work.
Artists do the same thing. They don’t create something from nothing, they build on what has gone before. They try out new ideas. They throw out the bad ideas and they keep trying new variations on the good ones.
The book succeeds in part by flattering the reader: what you are doing is god-like. God as artist implies artist as god. I confess to enjoying the god-as-mathematician and god-as-programmer versions of this theme, but a flattering analogy is not necessarily an accurate analogy.