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13.3.2 Objective Versus Psychological Creativity
There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because
before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted
—Henri Matisse
How people
judge
creativity is at some variance with what we have presented above.
Of course, if there is too much variance, then our claim to have somehow captured
the essence of the concept of creativity with this definition would come under pres-
sure. However, we think the most obvious discrepancies between our definition and
human judgements of creativity can be handled by the addition of a single idea,
namely habituation.
Human judgement of the novelty of a stimulus follows a path of negative ex-
ponential decay over repeated exposure (Berlyne
1960
, Saunders and Gero
2002
).
Whereas our definition simply makes reference to pre-existing frameworks, psy-
chological judgement of creativity takes into account
how long
those frameworks
have been around and how different they are perceived to be from existing frame-
works. New frameworks, and the artefacts they produce, remain creative for some
time, with new productions losing their impression of creativity as the frameworks
become older. The pointillist paintings of Seurat were startling, new and creative
when they first arose, and then likewise the impressionists and subsequently the cu-
bists. But it is now a long time since paintings strictly adhering to those styles would
be thought creative.
A new framework that is too radical will not immediately be recognised as cre-
ative, even though our measure would detect its creativity. Radical changes brought
about by an individual are not recognised by humans as creative until scaffolding,
a series of intermediate frameworks through which others may step to the radical
framework, has been established. This is a process that, depending on the creativity
of the individual responsible, may take generations of theorists and practising artists
to construct.
Figure
13.2
illustrates this idea. In the beginning there were frameworks pro-
ducing points; new points were judged good. But soon they lost their interest. New
means of creating being needed, straight lines were discovered, which subsequently
were connected to create outlines, then elaborated into representations, designs and
perspectives, surfaces and geometries, and abstract representations. Note that the
steps within this diagram are not so radical as to be incomprehensible to a human
observer. They progress along a fairly clear path through the design space.
This is not the history of anything real, but a history of drawing creativity in some
possible world. While the end of this history is unsaid, it is interesting to observe
that before its end it has recreated its beginning: points have once again become cre-
ative. In this case, points may well have become creative for a new reason, with the
framework generating them being new. But even old frameworks may become cre-
ative again, once cultural memory has utterly forgotten them. Thus, psychological
creativity actually requires two time-decay functions, one indicating desensitisation
to the new and another, operating over a much longer time frame, indicating cultural
