Oli Mould’s Against Creativity (Verso, 2018) provides a lively critique of the glorification of creativity pervasive in the United Kingdom and North America. Mould finds massive fault in the use of the rhetoric of creativity as a means to encourage ceaseless economic growth and the perpetuation of societal inequality. He follows major theorists of culture (Deleuze and Guattari; Adorno and Horkheimer) and argues that, while the desire to create is fundamentally human and exists beyond traditional artistic expressions, “creativity” has become a hollow and destructive neoliberal value. Against Creativity tells the story of creative culture gone awry, attending in turn to creativity rhetoric’s impact on work, people, politics, technology, and the city.
A lecturer in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, Mould researches the forces that propagate inequality in urban environments. His first book, Urban Subversion and the Creative City, identifies how urban subcultures promote a form of creativity that destabilizes strict urban power structures. Against Creativity looks at a more neoliberal side of creativity at the intersection of late capitalism, politics, and technology; it critiques creativity at the level of both the creative class and the personality trait itself. Mould adopts a broad definition of the creative class from University of Toronto Professor Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), a book adopted by government officials as a blueprint for “regenerating” cities. The creative class comprises people whose work is entrepreneurial, related to scientific and technological pursuits, or attached to traditionally artistic industries.[1] More generally, its members are “knowledge workers” who can be identified by their flexible working hours, casual office attire, and foosball tables. Florida promotes this view of creativity as a way to produce wealthy, dynamic cities—while obtusely ignoring the harm caused to those without the access or means to join the creative class.[2] Mould, on the other hand, complains, “being creative today means seeing the world around you as a resource to fuel your inner entrepreneur.”[3] “Creativity” appears as a desired trait in job postings from healthcare to hospitality; as rhetoric, it promotes entrepreneurialism across all levels and fields of work.
Mould is not the only left-leaning critic to take issue with Florida’s prescriptions. Against Creativity is in the company of Sarah Brouillette’s Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford UP, 2014), Mark Banks’s The Politics of Cultural Work (Palgrave, 2007), and Andrew Ross’s Nice Work If You Can Get It (NYU, 2009). Mould’s book distinguishes itself by focusing specifically on how creativity rhetoric changes life in cities. The concept of the creative city has circulated in the field of Urban Studies since the 90s. Creative cities are the typical residence for young elites who may have headed for the suburbs decades prior. Since then, Mould shows that urban developers and city councils looking to increase the economic viability and vibrancy of their cities have deployed the arts and creative capital as tools of gentrification (scholars refer to this as chasing the ‘Bilbao effect,’ so-called for the outsized impact that building a branch of the Guggenheim museum had on the city of Bilbao in Northern Spain).[4]
In the first two chapters on individuals and work, Mould focuses on the twenty-first-century urban creative class experience. He examines how workers are expected to come up with new ideas in their uncompensated leisure time, making it difficult to clock out from creative work. This “always-on” mindset assigns a monetary value to every minute, eliminating any hope of a work-life balance. Mould also attends to how racialization, ableism, class inequality, and other forms of gatekeeping, particularly in elite universities, produce barriers to entering the creative class in the first place.
In his third chapter, Mould starts with a standard critique of contemporary creative industries’ absorption of politics into their scheduled programing. The media circus constructs a reality that masks and oversimplifies very real political issues. For example, Mould cites a tweet about banning transgender people from the military that actually became policy. Relatedly, the debate spectacles, rather than concrete policies, influence who will be elected the next President of the United States. Mould sums this up, “Like reality TV, with its acquiescence to an unreal reality, US presidential debates have lost any connection to political realities with all their contradictions, complexities and real-life consequences.”[5] Much more sinister: creativity rhetoric puts a shine on the dismantling of government and industry regulation. The financial innovations and so-called “creative accounting” which led to the crash in 2008 illustrate the pitfalls of promoting creativity at all costs. What’s more, the subsequent championing of creativity as a way to climb out of the creativity-induced recession enabled Wall Street to carry on without much additional regulation because “regulation is the enemy of flexible, agile and creative work.”[6]
Weaving the creativity narrative into austerity policies becomes the means for asking communities to do more with less and pinning the blame on public institutions that could not come up with ways to make up for a loss of funding. Libraries and schools that could not make do under austerity measures were considered “not creative enough”—their failure became their own fault, not that of the system. Creativity seems apolitical, but Mould argues the austerity policies reveal how creativity functions as a political agent. The endless promotion of creativity determined the political policies and regulations that upset millions of lives during and after 2008; this rhetoric continues to increase socioeconomic inequality by justifying the austerity that further exacerbates that crisis.
Mould’s fourth chapter on technology falters a bit; it shifts loosely between vignettes on AI’s creativity (such as a script’s ability to “create” a new Rembrandt or Google’s Twitter bot), creative applications of technology, and the creativity of people coding. He is interested in technology because “creativity” is a buzzword used to overvalue the ideal of technological progress to capitalist ends. Mould aligns how new tools and apps invade people’s personal lives with his broader argument that for the creative class, work-life balance is a joke. He regrets that companies currently use AI for the monetization of everything from spare rooms and cars on sharing apps to individual words bid on for search-result real estate by anyone with a web presence via Google AdWords. Mould criticizes so-called “personalization” technology and recommendation algorithms for creating echo chambers of political inaction, perhaps a hackneyed complaint.[7]
Mould hits his stride in the last chapter on his métier, the role of creativity in exacerbating urban inequality. He critiques the creative class for their complacency about the gentrifying effects of corporate agendas—complacency that makes them accomplices to the displacement of neighborhoods and shortage of affordable housing in a global range of cities. Against the narrative that artists move for cheap rent and accidentally end up gentrifying a neighborhood as yuppies follow, Mould shows how the process is often much more intentional in practice on the part of both authorities and creative class members. The issue, Mould claims, is that if cities want to attract the labor that will attract the Amazon HQ2s of the world and all of their according wealth, they need to build and brand themselves accordingly, with “the right mix of intellectualism, cultural diversity and old school charm to woo these footloose, agile and energetic creative types”—in other words, they need to gentrify.[8] City planners and developers make use of an arsenal of practices that fall into the category of artwashing (“the concealment of ethically dubious corporate activity under an artistic and cultural veil”[9]). They lure artists to under-resourced neighborhoods to gain sponsorship of cultural institutions, and city-sanctioned “street art” proliferates, employing “traditionally ‘resistive’ and anti-capitalist themes in the service of profitability.”[10] But, as Mould argues, a mission to attract the creative class goes too far when it results in the “place-making” practices of branding a low-income neighborhood an “Arts District” or a “new” Brooklyn or Shoreditch while ignoring who and what was there before.
Throughout the book Mould shies away from in-depth discussion of explicitly artistic creativity. His preferred version of creativity is creativity ex nihilo, the act of creating something from nothing; this definition of creation is convenient in the economic and theoretical sense, but the plastic and literary arts generally involve preexisting materials. Mould doesn’t want to fully dispense with the term “creativity,” but rather wants to narrow its definition. New apps that keep us consuming do not constitute creative technology. Instead Mould argues for cultivating radical creativity that disrupts the way we consume and organize. He offers a few examples of “creative” social projects that fit his new definition: the Recuperadas movement in Argentina of worker-owned and -managed factories; alternate regional currencies like the Brixton Pound, which promote local cooperation; and the protest group UK Uncut, which practices creative-protest strategies against tax evading firms through efforts like turning a Barclays branch into a library to highlight the social services that would not face austerity measures if banks and retailers did not evade paying taxes.
While Mould’s narrow definition of creativity is compelling, Against Creativity could have benefited from a closer look at the social history of properly artistic creativity. The barriers for an artist to earn recognition foreshadow barriers to the creative class. These barriers have existed since creativity was first championed as a trait of individual artists around the fifteenth century; Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists reflected a shift from celebrating the organizations that employed craftsmen, like the church, to naming and celebrating individual artistic geniuses—culture would swing between valuing collective and individualist creativity for centuries to come. Mould does include a breakneck history of artistic creativity, but collapses some of this complexity, noting reductively that Shakespeare would not have been considered a genius but “a wordsmith whose work was to be appreciated, enjoyed and ‘consumed’ collectively.” When Mould argues that artists today are often encouraged to create work that will promote their careers instead of radical, anti-capitalist art, he fails to give examples of what radical, anti-capitalist art looks like, let alone how artists could survive in the art world without promoting their career. Mould fails to engage with works such as Sarah Brouillette’s Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford UP, 2014) or Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work (Duke UP, 2011) that debunk the vocational narrative wherein artists should be so in love with their creative pursuits that compensation, healthcare, and job security become secondary considerations.[11]
Originally published in 2018, the 2020 paperback reissue of Against Creativity is timely. There is no shortage of creative attempts to sustain capitalism during the COVID-19 pandemic. The structure of work for the creative class is in flux. In the face of change, Against Creativity urges people to be a bit less creative in their pursuit of wealth. Instead, the Left must reclaim the language of creativity; people must use their ingenuity to imagine new ways to organize and live. As Mould suggests, “True creativity is to seek out the tiny voices offering viable alternatives to the injustices of capitalism.”[12] Now, as the creative class is destabilized by COVID-19, there are openings to think outside of the capitalist profit-driven box: Against Creativity is a call to create forms of cooperation that foster social connection and equality both interpersonally and at large.
Notes:
[1] Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 38.
[2] Notably, Florida has slightly changed his tune. After publishing The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited in 2012, which still promoted wholeheartedly the creative playbook as a recipe for developing a creative city, Florida gave a vague acknowledgement of the unintended consequences in 2017’s The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities are Increasing Inequality, Deepening the Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class – and What We Can Do About It. Though in this latter book Florida still suggests the solution is more urbanism, now with a more inclusive twist.
[3] Oli Mould, Against Creativity (London: Verso Books, 2020), 12.
[4] Mould, Against Creativity. 156.
[5] Ibid. 87.
[6] Ibid. 10.
[7] Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble (New York: Penguin Books, 2012)
[8] Mould, Against Creativity. 98
[9] Ibid. 163.
[10] Ibid. 160.
[11] Sarah Brouilette, Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 40.
[12] Mould, Against Creativity. 184