From the same cloying, smug, PR-obsessed octopus, with its celebrity bottom-feeders hoping for a leg-up on their own project, that brought us the BBC Music “God Only Knows” travesty comes “Get Creative”.
Thanks BBC we would be lost without you
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-31531887
Heh. I like the way that the report describes people doing a giant paint by numbers as “creative”.
I always wonder who delineates creativity. Why is paint by numbers (colouring in, then, basically) lumped in with art, whereas being, say, a programmer, is not?
Years ago, I lived in a shared house in which the residents very self-consciously divided themselves into “creatives” and “non-creatives”. The terms always baffled me. I’m a lawyer. At work I regularly free drafted contracts and came up with new solutions to business problems, usually for media organisations. This is non-creative, and I was told as much (“We needed another Non-Creative in the house, for balance”). One of my house-mates was working for a radio station, basically manning the desk, cuing up sound files and making sure the levels were right. He was a Creative.
Aren’t we all creative in our lives, in one way or another? Whether it’s spinning a lie as to why you’re late for work, or embellishing a story for the amusement of your mates, don’t we all have these instincts and apply them in small ways across the day to day? I’m not saying we’re all a Pencilsqueezer, or a Burt (far from it), but I’m distrustful of this notion that there’s some sort of Manichean dividing line between those ethereal beings whose every fart is a work of art, and those who labour in grey tedium on tasks which require no real human input. I’d prefer to see a campaign that aims to abolish that daft distinction and encourages people to recognise their own capacities, rather than giving them a passport for a brief holiday in Creativesville.
When it came down to it, I always suspected that the real source of the delineation in that old house of mine was far more prosaic than was being made out: if you owned a Mac, you were a creative.
Fist bump.
Completly agree – I similarly lead a corporate life in creative industries. There is a fair degree of “creatives/luvvies etc etc” who wear their “creativity” on their sleeve and because I am managing and not directly “creating” then I have to assume the mantle of creative void.
So from this starting point to be partonised by the BBC having Frank Skinner tell us “…its in all of you! Give it a go!”, grates.
And yes you are right with the Mac point.