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creative agency

📖 Definitions

"an agent has exercised creative agency when they have autonomously determined the work’s salient features and how these will be realized" (Anscomb 2020, 10). "Creativity as a kind of agency calls for a balance between directed control and spontaneity in order to realize novelty and value. The former requires that agents aim to produce a certain range of values that are relevant for the purpose, that they ‘exercise knowledge of how’ to produce a result with the relevant values (Gaut 2018, 131–2), and exhibit ‘an evaluative ability directed to the task at hand’ (Gaut 2010, 1040). Another way of putting this is to say that creative making ‘must involve flair’ in producing something valuable and original (Gaut 2003, 151). Hence, accidentally spilling a pot of paint and causing an aesthetically pleasing pattern on a canvas lying on the floor, for example, will not count as an instance of creativity. Flair, or directed control then, excludes purely by chance cases or mechanical search procedures (whereby one systematically works through all the relevant possibilities) which result in valuable novelty as being creative" (Anscomb 2020, 8).

🔗 Relations

📚 References

  • Anscomb, Claire. 2020 “Visibility, Creativity, and Collective Working Practices in Art and Science.” European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (5). https:doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-00310-z.
  • Gaut, B. N. 2018. "The Value of Creativity." In Creativity and Philosophy, edited by B. N. Gau, & M. Kieran. Routledge.