The Invention of Creativity (eBook)

Andreas Reckwitz is Professor of Cultural Sociology at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder).

Contents

Preface to the English edition

Introduction: The Inevitability of Creativity

1. Aestheticisation and the creativity dispositif: The social regime of aesthetic novelty

2. Artistic creation, the genius and the audience: The formation of the modern artistic field

3. Centrifugal art: Dissolving the boundaries of art practices

4. The rise of the aesthetic economy: Permanent innovation, creative industries and the design economy

5. The psychological turn in creativity: From the pathological genius to the normalisation of the self as resource

6. The Genesis of the star system: The mass media construction of expressive individuality

7. Creative cities: Culturalising urban life

8. Society of creativity: Structures, dissonance, alternatives

Notes

Index

"Whether you think you are creative or not, you should read on. In carefully dissecting the social and historical constitution of this concept, Andreas Reckwitz provides a compelling account of how creativity has become a defining feature of contemporary society."
Elizabeth Shove, Lancaster University

"Reckwitz's The Invention of Creativity is not a "creative industries" book. It is instead a sociology that addresses not so much the aestheticization of society as the societalization of the aesthetic - of the pervasion of what Reckwitz, with Foucault, calls the aesthetic dispositif. Neither a dismissal nor a celebration, the book is instead a genealogy of creativity - of how homo economicus has metamorphosed into homo aestheticus."
Scott Lash, Goldsmiths, University of London
"An impressive study."
Die Zeit

"With great intelligence and an argument grounded in scholarship, cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz shows just why we perceive creativity as a 'natural' human ability, and one that we feel is absolutely essential in order for us to develop and grow as individuals."
Frankfurter Rundschau

"A fascinating and ambitious book with a provocative thesis."
Times Literary Supplement