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Introduction

The Creation of Art: Issues and Perspectives

Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston

1. the occlusion of creation

Although the creation of art is a topic that should be a central one for
aesthetics, it has been comparatively neglected in recent philosophi-
cal writings about art. In one basic usage, the creation of art is simply
its making, and all artworks, however derivative or uninspired, are
created. There is also a richer, evaluative sense of “creation,” in which
mere making does not suffice for the creation of something. A man-
ager of a factory who, showing a visitor around, announced proudly,
not that “here we make plastic spoons,” but “here we create plastic
spoons,” would sound risibly pretentious. Creation in this richer, eval-
uative usage is a special kind of making, a making that involves a signif-
icant degree of creativity, and is contrasted with the kind of routinized
making that mass production exemplifies.
In respect of the making aspect of creation, there has been, ever
since the rise of formalism and then of (post-)structuralism, a pow-
erful current that has dismissed attention to the processes of mak-
ing as irrelevant to philosophical aesthetics, theories of criticism, and
criticism itself. There has also been a counter-current that has ar-
gued that this inattention is a deep mistake, and proponents of such
theories as intentionalism have argued for the necessity of constru-
ing the artwork as the product of the artist’s actions. But even this
tradition, as some of the essays in this volume imply, has not al-
ways scrutinized artworks with that attention to the details of their

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2 Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston

making which adequate answers to these philosophical issues would

demand.
Although the subject of the making of art has not achieved the full
degree of attention it merits, it is in respect of the creativity aspect of
our topic that the neglect is particularly striking. Creativity was, from
Plato onwards, a recognised issue for investigation in philosophy, and
its investigation has at times played an important role in aesthetics;
but it has in recent times been underemphasized. Our point here is
not that nothing has been written on the topic in the last few years –
indeed, we will review some of this recent work in the next section.
Yet compared to the vast amount of work that has been done on such
subjects in aesthetics as the definition, interpretation, and evaluation
of art; the features specific to different arts; and even on specialized
subjects such as fakes, tragedy, the paradox of fiction, gender, genre
and so on; creativity has been neglected. And when it has been dis-
cussed, it has often been in terms of creativity in general, embracing
the sciences as well as the arts, so that its importance for aesthetics has
not always been brought out.
This situation is strikingly odd, in respect of both aspects of our
topic. Works of art, unlike natural objects, are after all works, the prod-
ucts of makings; and art is often supposed to be a paradigm of creative
making, the human practice that most clearly exemplifies the creativity
that is more obscurely at home in other fields. There is in fact a long
tradition of analogising the artist to God the creator: indeed, Milton
C. Nahm has argued that it is the “great analogy” that has influenced
thinking about art since classical times.1 Though clearly not all or even
the majority of artworks are creative, the view that there is a special
connection between art and creativity is independent of this claim,
and merits philosophical investigation as to its truth and import. And
further impetus for a philosophical investigation is imparted by the ob-
servation that a central term in the evaluation of artworks is “creative.”
There are, in fact, a host of important and interesting questions that
can be, and intermittently have been, asked about the role that creative
making should play in our understanding and evaluation of art, as the
next section will illustrate in some detail. The neglect or obscuring of
these questions can only impoverish aesthetics.
These observations raise the question of why the issues surrounding
the creation of art have suffered this relative neglect in philosophical

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The Creation of Art: Issues and Perspectives 3

aesthetics. We suggest that a central reason lies in the influence, to

which we have already alluded, of formalist, structuralist, and post-
structuralist currents during large parts of the last century.2 The
neglect was not confined to philosophy; indeed, the situation in philos-
ophy was influenced by powerful currents within criticism and literary
theory. The turn away from research into the making of art had a va-
riety of motivations and rationales, only some of which involved the
real and perceived foibles of the “life and works” biographical ap-
proach that many critics were eager to supplant. In the New Criticism’s
break with both common-sense biographical criticism and those ver-
sions of biographical criticism based on existentialism, hermeneutics,
and phenomenology, a leading idea was that an appropriate form
of aesthetic appreciation requires the critic to focus entirely on the
finished text’s or other artistic structure’s inherent, artistically rele-
vant features. (Typically, no distinction was drawn between the text
or structure and the work of art.) Facts about the text’s provenance
were to be set aside, especially whenever such facts were a matter
of the “private” psychology of the creator, held to be unknowable
or irrelevant. A salient example is W. C. Wimsatt and Monroe C.
Beardsley’s criticism of John Livingston Lowes’ painstaking attempt
to reconstruct Samuel Coleridge’s creation of “Kubla Khan,” which
attempt had been partly motivated by the poet’s own strikingly mys-
tifying account of the poem’s origins.3 The anti-intentionalists claim
that although Lowes presents us with a “glittering parade” of infor-
mation about Coleridge’s sources and imagination, this sort of criti-
cal discourse leads us away from “the poem itself” and so is critically
irrelevant.
Structuralist and post-structuralist theorists and critics were sharply
critical of many aspects of New Criticism, beginning with the empha-
sis on aesthetic appreciation and the so-called autonomy of art, but
they reiterated the attack on biographical criticism’s assumption that
the artist’s activities and experience were a privileged critical topic.
Roland Barthes hyperbolically evokes a liberating mode of reading
in which the text “is read without the father’s signature” – where
the father in question was thought to be the repressive concept of
the author-proprietor of the work, wrongly projected onto the text
by non-progressive readers.4 Ironically, these anti-humanist critical
trends, which by the 1980s had become hegemonic, did not in fact

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4 Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston

fully free criticism from the notions and values that had been asso-
ciated with creativity at least since Romanticism. Instead, interest in
creativity reappeared, sometimes with a vengeance, in the context of
reflections on the critic’s own achievements: Geoffrey H. Hartman’s
Derrida-inspired book, Criticism in the Wilderness, is an influential exam-
ple of a case in which a prominent professor of literature proclaimed
that the critic’s own artistic ambitions should replace the scholar’s
more traditional epistemic aims.5 Within the post-structuralist move-
ment, critics or communities thereof were said to play the active role of
endowing texts with meaning and value, thereby constituting those
“signifying practices” of which a culture is composed. In some of the
bolder speculations, it was the reader and not the author who was
thought to do the job of endowing a text with its very status as litera-
ture. Thus Barthes wrote that “only the critic executes the work.”6 And
as Stanley Fish put it, “it is not that the presence of poetic qualities
compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain
kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities.”7 Any
“piece of language” can become a member of the class of literary texts
provided that some sufficiently influential group of readers provides
the requisite poetical attention. And anecdotal self-reference became
a veritable mannerism in the vein of criticism marketed as the New
Historicism. Having rightly castigated biographical critics for seeking
to explain what happens in fictions by identifying anecdotal sources in
the author’s childhood and fantasies, the post-structuralist critic comes
full circle by inserting the story of her own private life into “readings”
of the work of art.8
The influence of these tendencies in criticism helps explain the ne-
glect of the topic of the creation of art within philosophical aesthetics.
New Criticism revitalised formalism within philosophy, Beardsley play-
ing a prominent role here. The belief in the autonomy of art and
the anti-intentionalist stance inevitably made inquiry into creation
and the creative process seem aesthetically irrelevant. Philosophers
had previously often discussed the creative process in art as central
to the process of understanding art, R. G. Collingwood’s theory of art
as expression being perhaps the most influential of these twentieth-
century theories.9 In a paper on the creation of art, Beardsley attacked
Collingwood’s theory, but more importantly, having developed his
own thoughts on the process of artistic creation, concluded that such

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The Creation of Art: Issues and Perspectives 5

theories have no bearing at all on understanding or evaluating art-

works. Creativity is, rather, a property of the art-object, and the only
kind of aesthetically relevant creation occurs in the audience’s re-
sponse to the work: “In the experience of a melody, creation occurs
before our very ears.”10 Although formalism concentrated on the na-
ture of the art object, already in Beardsley’s invocation of the audience
we see an indication of a tendency that Richard Wollheim identified
as the “principal target” of his 1968 book, Art and Its Objects: “the ten-
dency to conceive of aesthetics as primarily the study of the spectator
and his role: that is to say, his responses, his interests, his attitudes,
and the characteristic tasks he set himself.”11 Other instances of that
tendency are not hard to find: the Institutional Theory of Art, for in-
stance, held that what makes an object an artwork is having conferred
upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person acting
on behalf of the artworld.12 Such persons might be artists, but they
could also be dealers, curators, journalists, spectators, and so on. As in
post-structuralism, creation was divorced from any necessary relation
to the artist.
The situation in philosophy has, however, been materially different
from that in criticism in one respect, since reflection on the impor-
tance of the making of art has never been as neglected as it has been at
times in criticism. Indeed, the importance of the idea that artworks are
made has received strong support in the recent work of intentionalists
of various kinds, as well as from supporters of historical definitions
of art, and theorists who hold that works are action-types. But despite
this resurgence of interest in artworks as made objects or as intentional
actions or performances, the issues surrounding creation, particularly
in respect of creativity, have not enjoyed that prominence which they
deserve once the importance of the activity of creating artworks is
acknowledged.

2. artistic creation: the state of the debate

To set the scene for the papers in this collection, we now review some
of the philosophical work that has previously been done on the is-
sues concerning creation, in the evaluative sense that includes creativ-
ity. The following is not, however, intended to be a comprehensive
survey either of the topics discussed or of what has been written on

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6 Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston

them by philosophers. In the course of it, we also draw on some of

the voluminous psychological writings on creativity, where they help
to fill out or illuminate the philosophical discussion. As Robert S.
Albert and Mark A. Runco observe in a recent survey of the history
of psychological research on creativity, nearly every major twentieth-
century psychologist has explored the topic, and at present “the field
can only be described as explosive.”13 We examine six topics, and
we also briefly indicate where the papers in the volume engage with
these issues; the papers will be summarized separately in the next
section.

(a) The Making of Art

An aspect of the creation of art, in the basic sense of the making of art,
has been discussed in the context of a debate about what is involved
in correctly interpreting art. Anti-intentionalists, such as formalists,
hold that the intentions involved in the making of art are irrelevant or
peripheral to correctly interpreting art. So details of the act of creating
a work, though possibly of interest in themselves, have no bearing on
the correct interpretation of the work. The anti-intentionalist holds
that mere scrutiny of the art-object independently of knowledge of its
generative conditions suffices to interpret it. This position has been
attacked on numerous grounds. It has, for instance, been argued by
Kendall Walton that the categories under which we perceive art are in
part fixed by the generative conditions, including intentions, of the
work. And Guy Sircello has argued that there is a conceptual relation
between a work expressing something, and the artistic acts performed
in the work.14 The anti-formalist thesis that in looking at art we are
looking at artistic actions is pursued by Patrick Maynard in the present
volume.
Intentionalists, unlike formalists, hold that reference to intentions is
essential in fixing the correct interpretation of works. Since intentions
figure in the process of making the work, to understand a work must
for the intentionalist be in part to reconstruct the process of its making.
Wollheim holds that “The task of criticism is the reconstruction of the
creative process, where the creative process must in turn be thought
of as something not stopping short of, but terminating on, the work
of art itself.”15 Within the intentionalist camp, there is an important

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The Creation of Art: Issues and Perspectives 7

distinction. Actual intentionalists, such as Richard Wollheim,

Gary Iseminger, Noël Carroll, William Irwin, and E. D. Hirsch, hold
that it is the historically real intentions of the actual artist that deter-
mine correct interpretation of works.16 They differ on how wide the
notion of an intention is to be drawn (for instance, Wollheim under-
stands it broadly, to include any mental state that causally generates
a work of art); but they agree that it is the actual mental states of
the artist that matter for the interpretative task.17 Proponents of dif-
ferent versions of hypothetical and fictionalist intentionalisms, such
as Jerrold Levinson, William Tolhurst, and Alexander Nehamas, on
the other hand, hold that it is the hypothesized or imagined inten-
tions of the artist as a critical construct (variously called the “implied,”
“postulated,” or “constructed” author) that determine correct inter-
pretations. These hypothesized or imagined intentions may differ from
what are known to be the real intentions of an author, because certain
evidence about real intentions is excluded in principle – for instance,
information drawn from private diaries may be ruled out.18 The two
kinds of intentionalists have different views about the creative process:
actual intentionalists think of the process as the actual historical events
that terminated in the production of the work; hypothetical intention-
alists, in contrast, regard the creative process, insofar as it bears on
the issue of interpretation, as itself a hypothetical construct. One is-
sue concerning the creation of art, then, concerns how relevant the
details of the actual creative process are to determining the correct
interpretation of works. Paisley Livingston discusses this issue in the
present collection.
A second respect in which issues about the making of art have
entered into philosophical discussion concerns ontology, the question
of what kind of thing an artwork is. A central debate here surrounds
the status of those artistic structures (such as musical compositions
and literary texts) which, as kinds or types, may be held to be universals
and hence timeless – and therefore not the sort of thing that can be
created by someone at a particular time and place. Yet this view stands
in apparent contradiction to the common opinion that artworks are, in
fact, created in particular socio-historical contexts. Various strategies
for attempting to resolve this paradox are explored in the literature.
Some writers attempt to defend a nominalist conception of artworks.
Others accept Platonist tenets while denying that the commonplace

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about works being created expresses any genuine insight.

Peter Kivy, for example, doubts that there are widespread, informative
intuitions linking great music and creation, and holds that artistic
achievement is better explicated in terms of discovery and selection –
which may or may not be called “creative” in the sense of worthwhile
and innovative. A composer can plausibly be said to discover or select –
but not to create – a previously existing musical Form.19 Another strat-
egy is to accept both premisses of the paradox of artistic creation and
conclude that what gets created – a work of art – must be more than
an artistic structure, a move which Stefano Predelli usefully labels the
“Argument from Creation.”20 An example is Jerrold Levinson’s con-
tention that musical works are initiated types, that is, they are sound
structures (or more precisely sound/performing-means structures)
that are indicated by a composer at a time or in a specific cultural
context.21 There is little agreement, however, as to whether such a
position genuinely allows for artistic creation in a suitably robust
sense: Levinson contends that it does, while Kivy, Predelli, Currie, and
others contest the point.
This question about the ontology of art has a close analogue with
a question about the ontology of fictional characters, which, if viewed
as collections of abstract properties or traits, similarly seem to be uni-
versals, and thus to encounter the same problems concerning the pos-
sibility of their creation. Peter Lamarque discusses the latter issue in
the present volume and defends a view that allows fictional characters
to be created in a straightforward sense.22

(b) Defining “Creativity”

Turning more closely to the evaluative sense of “creation,” the next is-
sue concerns what precisely is meant by the term “creativity.” There is a
broad consensus that creative products and acts must exhibit original-
ity and be valuable. Kant captured this dual condition when he defined
“genius” as a matter of exemplary originality, a view that Paul Guyer
discusses in the present volume. Mere originality does not suffice for
genius, since there can be, Kant remarks, original nonsense, which he
saw in those Sturm und Drang artists who strove after originality while
lacking talent to produce something worthwhile (an observation that
resonates in the context of some recent art movements). Exemplarity

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The Creation of Art: Issues and Perspectives 9

of artworks is a matter of their serving as a standard or rule for art, and

is thus a mark of their value.23
The correctness of the dual condition of originality and value has
been widely, though not universally, accepted by philosophers. For in-
stance, Carl Hausman, in developing criteria for creativity, bases them
on the observation that “creativity occurs on condition that a new
and valuable intelligibility comes into being.”24 Psychologists have also
generally agreed that creativity involves at least these two constituent
factors.25 The first condition corresponds to the platitude that no mat-
ter how useful an instance of routine problem-solving may be, it cannot
be creative. One way in which psychologists have specified this condi-
tion is to add that if a novel and valuable idea or “response” is creative,
it must be addressed to a task or problem that is “heuristic rather
than algorithmic.”26 The second condition expresses the thought that
a wholly new yet useless or destructive invention cannot be creative,
since truly creative innovations must be valuable, useful, appropriate,
or adaptive.
Within this broad consensus there are, however, disputes. A first
source of disagreement concerns what to say about independent dis-
coveries. When a chess master invents an effective chess opening, the
likes of which has never been seen by informed experts, it is uncon-
troversial to deem this a creative contribution to the game. What,
however, if a precocious young player independently rediscovers the
same opening some years later, without knowing of the earlier in-
vention? Some have held that such an achievement would not be
a creative one. As psychologist Colin Martindale expresses this po-
sition, “Were someone to rediscover the theory of relativity, we would
think the person to be quite clever but not creative because the idea
has already been discovered.”27 Mihály Csikszentmihályi agrees, and
goes on to claim that it follows that the creative process takes place
outside the person, in the interactive system where ideas and arti-
facts get made and appreciated.28 Other psychologists, however, deny
that any absolute form of novelty should be deemed necessary to
creativity. They prefer to investigate creativity as a species of inno-
vative thinking or problem-solving located within the creative agent
(or group of collaborating agents).29 George Mandler, for example,
claims that “from a psychological point of view, the focus of interest
is, of course, a creative or novel act by an individual, whether or not

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the same novelty has been produced by any or many other individuals
before.”30
One response to such disagreements is to distinguish between dif-
ferent senses of “creativity.” Margaret Boden distinguishes historical
from psychological creativity (H- and P-creativity, as she calls them).
An idea is P-creative if it is valuable and “the person in whose mind
it arises could not have had it before”; the relation holds whether or
not the idea has ever been had before.31 To be H-creative, the idea
must be not only P-creative, but also must never have been had by
anyone else in all of human history. This is, we may note in passing,
a rather strong condition, and weaker, tradition and context-specific
alternatives could be formulated.
Boden’s reference to ideas that could not have been had before
brings us to a second source of disagreement about creativity: how to
specify the degree of originality that it requires. If originality simply
meant that something is new in some respect or other, then almost
any idea or product would count as original. Boden’s modal condition
attempts to specify the relevant difference. It does not express some
form of metaphysical necessity, but rather a relation between the val-
ued idea and the generative rules that structure a person’s productive
activities. For example, Boden holds (pace Chomsky) that the gener-
ation of previously unheard-of well-formed phrases in English is not
an instance of P-creativity, because such utterances are covered by the
grammar of the language, and thus in a sense could have been pro-
duced before. Genuine P-creativity requires a “change of conceptual
space” in which something emerges that would have been impossible
had the agent’s activity remained determined by the generative rules
which obtained before. It requires dropping one or more of the rules
that structure the conceptual space; and the “deeper” the rule that is
dropped (i.e., the more fundamental the role which the rule plays in
structuring the system), the more radically P-creative is the result.
David Novitz has criticized this criterion. Goodyear invented vulcan-
isation by dropping various substances into liquid rubber until he came
across the correct one by trial and error. He altered the conceptual
space for thinking about rubber, but his achievement was not creative;
so satisfaction of the modal criterion is insufficient for creativity. Nor
is it necessary: Jenner invented vaccination and should be counted as
creative, but there existed no conceptual space concerning vaccination

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