Be creative! In contemporary society, the requirement and the desire to be creative and to creatively bring forth something new have spread to an unusual degree. What was once reserved for subcultural circles of artists has become a universally valid cultural model, indeed an imperative. Andreas Reckwitz examines how the ideal of creativity has been forced in the course of the 20th century: in the art of the avant-garde and postmodernism, the creative industries and the innovation economy, in the psychology of creativity and self-growth, as well as in the media representation of the creative star and the urban planning of creative cities. It becomes apparent that we are living in times of a process of social aestheticization that is as radical as it is restrictive.
If there is one desire that pushes the boundaries of the understandable within contemporary culture, it would be that of not wanting to be creative. This is true for individuals as well as for institutions. Not being able to be creative is a problematic weakness, but one that can possibly be cured and overcome with patient training. But not to want to be creative, to consciously leave creative potentials unused, not to even want to creatively bring forth or allow something new from oneself, seems to be an absurd desire, just as it may have been the intention at other times not to be moral, not to be normal or not to be autonomous. How could an individual or an institution, indeed a whole society, not want what seems to be naturally inherent in it, where it or they naturally strive: towards creative self-transformation?
The extraordinary relevance attributed to Creativity as an individual and social phenomenon in our present can be seen in Richard Florida's programmatic study The Rise of the Creative Class from 2000. According to Florida, the central transformation that has occurred in Western societies between the postwar period and the present is not so much a technological as a cultural one. It has been taking place since the 1970s and concerns the emergence and spread of a "creative ethos." Its bearer is a new, rapidly expanding and culturally tone-setting professional group, the creative class, with its distinctive activities of producing ideas and symbols-from advertising to software development, from design to consulting and tourism. Creativity, in Florida's account, does not refer solely to a private model of self-expression. It has also become a pervasive economic requirement of the working and professional world over the past three decades.
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RECKWITZ, Andreas, 2013. Die Erfindung der Kreativität: zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung. 3. Auflage. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 1995. ISBN 978-3-518-29595-3. page 