About creativity
The points below seem to define what art means or the definitions of aesthetic, leaning more towards art philosophy than about creativity to a person with an artist’s background like me. You may ask what creativity is, for me the motivations of creativity personally:
• I feel compelled psychologically and that not making art is detrimental to my sanity.
• It is what I do best so, it is both a pleasure for my ego (Freud) and it is also the highest on my ‘Maslow’s hierarchy of needs’.
• It is essential to how I operate and how I engage with other people around me.
• It is God’s mandate that I share my talents according to his will.
• I have used it as the force of good in educating as means for empowerment, identity formation and self-realization of young minds.
The above points are relevant to me not only as an aspect of my creativity but it also indicate some definitons of art is defined by non-artists and scientists like anthropologists as the measure by which a civilization's mettle is tested in time, including the dot points below.
-for social scientists art legitimises an institution's and society’s nomothetic & idiographic frameworks ifor vocational purposes (Article: Culture and assessment: nomothetic and idiographic considerations from:Career Development Quarterly Article date:June 1, 2009 Author: Diemer, Matthew A.; Gore, Paul A., Jr..
-functional, pleases the eye and stimulates the mind all at once.
-expression (nothing to do with the Expressionist art movement).
For philosophers and writers art and the creative prime directive is about:
-representation 'memesis'-imitation (Plato).
-significant form, (Bell & Fry).
-frozen emotion (Tolstoy).
-pleases the divine nature of man, elevation of crude Phillistines into men of culture and refinement (Hegel)
-an organic whole and made from complex (early Weisz) disparate parts that would not have made sense if taken apart.
-too complicated to define (late Weisz).
-exercises the free play of the imagination (Kant).
-pure intuition (Croce)
-polemical in intention (Wittgenstein)
-intertextuality (Foucault)
-satisfies the imaginative need for social harmony (Parker) and 'group think' (Orwell).
Although there are great deal more definitions of art and creativity that I can compile here (there would be no point for a exhaustive list as this is not the right context for it) and it would be beyond me to list them of all if I was so inclined.
For me and creativity, art & aesthetics are inextricably linked save for purist's opinion that only the high art can only be considered worthy of discussion. For that matter I would leave to academics alone.
