Author: Kathryn Cornelius
Graduation Year: 2004
Advisor: Matthew Tinkcom
Reader:
Date: 02 March 2007
Link to Thesis: KathrynCornelius.pdf
It seems that everyone is talking about creativity. Business executives
champion creativity as a new way of stimulating innovation in the workplace, while commercial art galleries are competing to discover the next “hot” artist from a growing pool of art school grads, hedging their bets on an artist’s future worth by the creative potential her artwork shows today. The contemporary political economy of Art and Business are driven by a shared ideology of autonomous, entrepreneurial creative labor, which is based on a historicized mythology of the artist as an individual social outsider/creative genius. But just how “freeing” is the creativity of the artist or businessman? What potential for critique does the model of the contemporary artist collective offer to a system of creative labor that is inherently contradicted by the competitiveness of individualism?