Lectures: Exploring the Psychology of Creativity

So let's get started from the top and as the most obvious question how do psychologist Define creativity well I think the the most fundamental element of creativity is actually conceptualized as a biological trait so people have different personalities and we all know that Although our terminology for describing those personalities is Broad and somewhat Different diffult to categorize but psychologists have made a lot of progress on that over the last particularly in the last 40 years really from a strictly scientific perspective and we know that people differ in extroversion and extroverted people are gregarious and enthusiastic

and assertive and so they seem to Wi their way through the World by utilizing social capital and social networks extrs don't necessarily like ke but they like To be around you creative people extroverts uh no there well creat creative people are slightly tilted towards extroversion but that's not the fundamental Dimension okay in introverted people like to spend time alone and there's plenty of creative introverted people um that another personality Dimension is known as neuroticism somewhat unflatteringly and it's it's an index of sensitivity to negative emotion so that if people if You know people who are

volatile you know they're touchy and they they tend to fly off the handle or they're uh or they're they're sad or morose or anxious or tend to avoid stressful situations then they tend to be higher in trait neuroticism and that's specifically a negative emotion to mention extroversion is an index of positive emotion and so people they are separate biological systems positive and negative emotion they're trying to get us back to Creativity where well the the third the third category is agreeableness agreeable people are compassionate and and they basically live for for close intimate personal relationships

there's conscientious people who are dutiful and then there are open people and the open people it's the dimension is is called openness to experience there are people who are fundamentally interested in ideas so if you're talking to an open person they will immediately move the The conversation to to the discussion of ideas so most of the people in the audience tonight for those who aren't here for political curiosity are here because they're open people they want to they want to hear an intellectual discussion and and so open people are interested in ideas that's the intellect

component of openness and then they're also interested in Aesthetics and that would be where the artists really intellect and Aesthetics is where the Artists come out and those the thing that's important to know about that and it's why I went through all five traits is that these are fundamentally these are attributes and ways of looking at the world ways of Behaving that are fundamentally rooted in biology they're very very deep it's not a surface trait by any stretch of the imagination and uh creative people also tend to be uh higher in in in trait intelligence

technically speaking and that's the Ability to man manipulate abstractions rapidly so is creativity a sort of of second level then because the the uh the traits that you've just described don't include them where are they in that group well creativity creativity loads very highly with openness it's it's it is create creativity and openness are probably synonymous more or less although it isn't obvious that interest in ideas per se is the same as Creativity but that there's very few people who are artistic who aren't very interested in ideas so they they move along the same path

very tightly so let's unpack this s because you know it's axiomatic that creativity and art are uh indistinguishable is that true from the point of view of a psychologist I would say it's it's it's it's a pretty decent it's a pretty decent truth it's open people are the ones that are interested in Aesthetics so you know There are lots of people who are in some sense blind to Beauty it's actually one of the things that distinguishes strangely enough it distinguishes conservatives and liberals roughly speaking because Liberal Liberal people tend to be high in openness they

tend to be creative but they're low in trait conscientiousness so they're not very dutiful they're not particularly orderly they're not particularly industrious not not compared to conservatives liberals Yes and well it's partly because you see this is one of the paradoxes conservatives are high in con and conscientiousness especially orderliness and they're low in openness and I think the reason for that in part is that it's not that easy to be creative if you're too industrious or orderly because imagine imagine you want to be a musician and you're 18 19 years old or Worse 25 years

old you know it's well the thing is is that it it's it's an Insane thing to do if if you're someone who's dutiful and career oriented and practical because the probability that you're going to monetize your creativity is so low that it's it's futile to even attempt it in many situations and so if you're too concerned with convention and and productivity then that's going to undercut your ability to to to manifest adherence to your Creative Vision which also takes you in all sorts of directions none of which are necessarily Practical so one of the ways

of thinking about creativity is that it's it's a gambling strategy and and conservatives make low risk uh low return but certain bets really and whereas the more liberal types and the more creative types they make high risk high high return bets and so almost all of them fail but those who succeed succeed dramatically and they also change the world and so although it's very foolish to be creative it's creative people who who lead the Vanguard for forward into the unknown and transform the world so foolish as it is it's absolutely necessary foolish because risky yes

because risky yes I mean it's risk it's foolish in the same way that a high risk High return bet is foolish there's a high probability that you'll lose and so if you're a conservative person you're very concerned about hedging your bets you don't want to lose being creative is a very bad game to play but you won't play It anyways cuz you're conservative so it isn't going to matter so so you are an open uh late teen and you have conservative parents and you say Mom Dad um I think I've decided that I'm going to

be an artist oh yeah and they think what's wrong with that kid that's a that's a complicated uh conversation isn't it yes yes it's it's it's it's like discussing color with someone who's colorblind and and I mean that like and it's it's actually a perverse things About perverse thing about conservatives in some sense because the the data on the economic utility of artists is really really strong I mean artists artists and entrepreneurs are the same people and of course entrepreneurs are the people who provide all of the vision for the entire capitalist system they're absolutely

necessary but conservatives tend to be so blind to art that they can't even see that the artists are the people who drive the who drive the Economy forward but you make them sound so bad no there you look I mean so here's here's another way of thinking about it is AR we talking about political conservatives and political liberals yes we're also talking about trait like personality traits determine a voting patterns to a great degree so people vote their temperaments and this is something that's really useful to understand when you're engaged in a political discussion is

that the person Across the table from you who holds viewpoints other than yours is not doing it because they're stupid or ill-informed they're doing it because they are not the same sort of person you are and the the funny thing about about creative people versus conservative people say or liberal people versus conservative people is that liberals start companies and conservatives run them so and seriously mean that need conserv they're managers like Conscientious people make good managers and good administrators it's and they tend to do better in school too because diligence and dutifulness is an excellent

predictor of academic performance so if you want something if you want something that's already been invented implemented and then turned into a machine you don't get someone creative to do that they're off to do the next thing they're not even interested in That you'll bore them to death so wow uh so let's say you're an employer and you need uh some creative people is there a psychometric test uh to find out if someone's actually creative and they're going to be useful well IQ tests work I mean not not everyone with a high IQ is creative

lots of lawyers have high IQs and they tend not to be creative at all well you think think about why that is hey because lawyers are bound by precedent and and rules and so that Isn't the same as being creative and you don't you want a creative accountant no not really not not unless you're looking for a jail sentence so they don't like that word at all no no yeah that's right my creative accountant you know wink wink right so so so I mean I tested I tested psychometrically tested the H hundred most creative lawyers

in Canada as as a project about 15 years ago with a magazine called lexpert which was a high Prestige magazine among lawyers and we had lawyers from across the country be nominated for their by their firms for creativity and and so we got some really like these were outstanding lawyers so and we tested them psychometrically very very high in intelligence but um very not creative at all the first the first trait was conscientious dutiful hardworking uh diligent industrious orderly CU you know you're working 70 hours a week and you better bloody well Work if you're

in a position like that too so it's nose to the grindstone stuff very low in neuroticism because it's very stressful so they didn't experience much negative emotion very disagreeable people while they're l Ator say and so they they want to win they're not compassionate and they're not polite and only after that were they open so they weren't creative at all but they were extraordinarily intelligent so um do employers look for Creative people no no Not generally well it's a real it's a real conundrum so one of the things that's happening right now is that in

most businesses the non-creative people are increasingly being replaced by machines right because anything that's creative can't really be turned into an algorithm that you can run as a machine but anything that isn't creative can be and so there's increasing demand uh in corporations for Creative people but the problem with being creative is that You're useless at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy because at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy so a power hierarchy you should do what you're told to do you're not there to think outside the box you're there to learn what you're supposed

to do and implement it and creative people are like that's that isn't what they do now what happens though to companies is that because they filter all the creative People out at the bottom and then people start to rise up to the top you really need creative people at the top because they are the entrepreneurial types and they're the ones for example in law firms even though lawyers aren't very creative the more entrepreneurial ones are the ones that bring in all the business there's like great lawyers who can who can Implement who can who can

who can write well and communicate well are they're not a dime a dozen but They're relatively common but the ones who are entrepreneurial who can go out there and drum up new businessmen those people are super hyper valuable and they're very rare but they all but it's also very difficult to nurse them within any system because systems do not nurture creativity they're the antithesis of creativity because the artist is always the person who stands outside the structure and so or maybe builds his or her own structure you know Which is also why it's hard to

evaluate creative people you can't really because if they're operating within the confines of a system that has an evaluative structure they're not creative M so they're really pain they're a real pain to try to try to manage and to organize but you can select them you select people who are high in intelligence and high in openness we've done that in California so I work with this company called the founder Institute it's and It's it's quite a cool company it's run by this guy named to D RI and he has now started schools to Foster entrepreneurship

in 135 different cities and so we're testing in eight languages and um we can reliably select people who will have a functioning business bus within a year you you select them for high openness and high intelligence roughly speaking so it's it's certainly it's certainly something you can do but then you have to figure out what you're Going to do with those people because telling them what to do isn't going to work and putting them in a box is completely counterproductive so they're very annoying even though they're hyper necessary we um we work with living artists

and I spent my whole career working with living artists I worked with one dead artist once and I will never do that again uh but um it's not for the faint of heart it's not for everyone to manage creatives it's also Not for not for everyone to be one you know I've only known one person in my life that attempted to live more I would say fully as an artist outside of systems and I mean he was a jack of all trades he could do everything he was a licensed electrician he was a carpenter he

was a taxi driver he could pilot boats he was great at fixing up houses he was a designer he was a good speaker he's a good Problem Solver like a he chased all the rats out of the mill Campus at one point that was one of his jobs does he speak French he does he does give him my card yeah well and he's he's also a very accomplished artist but but and he was the best at that and great at social networking you know but even him he he he had to be dancing all the

time to to monetize his his capabilities with even with that multi-dimensional array of skills so it's very hard to be an artist and to survive over any reasonable period of Time what's wrong with our social structure well well first of all our creative people common uh are there a lot of them is this a problem we need to solve to find a way to integrate them and to ex I don't want to say exploit them but exploit their creativity for the greater good uh we don't seem to be very good at that we we've marginalized

them there's no minimum wage for visual artists for example no we do job can we fix this our commun the correlation Between grades and creativity in University at the University of Toronto for example is zero right but that's because it's not that easy to grade people who are creative but like so educational Institution doing a great job especially at at before the university level of just crushing creative people so because the education system was actually set up back in the late 1900s to train the children of workers to be obedient workers I mean You think

think all the desks are lined up in a row you're supposed to sit down you're supposed to shut up you're supposed to do what you're told you do things by the Bell that's a factory Bell that rings for recess and so forth they're factories you don't produce creative people in factories you produce fact workers and that's fine except there aren't any Factory workers anymore so we should probably stop doing it I'm not sure things have changed they Haven't changed at all things haven't changed very much no no and it's it's it you know it's it's

hard you were asking about the commonality of creativity too and the other thing that's difficult and horrible is that creative people are as rare as the winners of races you know no matter how many people who are are racing there's only one winner yeah well and and everything tends to go to the win winner and that's how things work in The world and the thing about being creative is that it isn't that you have to be creative it's that you have to be more creative than everyone else and good luck with that especially in in

an era where creativity is distributed unbelievably widely on platforms like the the internet now I read the other day and I probably got this figure wrong but the orders of magnitude are approximately correct 80 million songs are available for download online 70 Million of them get downloaded zero times right which is and that's typical of creative production right I mean most the number of Symphonies that most of you people have written is zero right the number of books you've published is zero the number of books you will publish is zero if you publish a book

the probability that it will be that it will sell more than 100,000 copies is zero right the the rejection rate for a good scientific paper is 99% so so it's very it's very very difficult to to be creative because you have to get there first and then even if you do get there very few people take all of the rewards you like you think about Stephen King for example right he's a really good example it's like half the money in the publishing business goes to Stephen King and the reason well here's why here's why you

know you go into think about where people buy books novels it's in it's in Airports often and so then you imagine that the geographical territory for the distribution of novels is something like The Book Rack in front of the bookstores in an airport bookstore right so it's this rack that's this big number one position that's worth God only knows how much number two position is worth half that number three position is worth half that and by the time you get down to number 50 position well you're not doing anywhere near as well As number one

but you're doing way better than all the other people who are getting zero and that piece of geographic real estate is replicated at every airport all over the world and so that one number one slot man that's where all the money goes it's like the 1% of the people who have 50% of the money and the 1% of them that have 50% of that money and the 1% of them that have 50% of that money The Winner Takes all and that's particularly true in a Creative domain The Winner Takes all and most people stack up

at zero it's really rough so creative people are getting a really rough they're not getting a break at all um and they're probably more creative people doing non-creative work in the workforce than the other way around oh definitely definitely and you know the thing is I don't want to paint too dismal a picture about being created because one of the things that pays off big for Creative people is that they get To be creative right there's great aesthetic joy in that in depth and I've been privileged because I've worked with more creative people than than

um than would fall to the lot let's say of the typical psychotherapist because people often come and see me because they've watched my videos online and and they deal with people who are interested in those subjects tend to be creative and one of the things I've really been struck by uh first of all I've learned That for those of you are interested in such things that the reason yian psychology works is because it works for Creative people doesn't work at all for non-creative people it's just Falls dead and flat for them they're not interested in

it at all it isn't how they think you mean as therapy yeah that it doesn't match it doesn't match their personalities whereas creative people man they dream archetypal dreams all the time it's really interesting and also They die if they're if they're not being creative they Wither on the vine I had one client I really liked him he was he was a brilliant architect and and uh his rational mind was his worst enemy because it just criticized everything he was hyper rational criticized everything and really in a dark way and effectively you know is if

I could get him to not think and just create he was a complete genius he he could that's where all of the Vitality in his life was you know that's where the sap rose up inside the dead tree that was sort of embedded inside of him and it's very common with creative people is that it's their lifeblood and it really is from a biological perspective this isn't some EP it's it's it's built right into people and deeply well this is something that those of us who work in art museums and work with living artists and

Contemporary Art uh if I have any contemp curators in in the Audience they'll know what I'm talking about this is a drama that we we live on a regular basis uh the number one uh is barely affordable but you're you're working with people who are absolutely brilliant but there's no way for them to monetize their Brilliance they're productive uh they're making wonderful art the experts love it the mark Market's not interested and they're having a hard time you can't support them by buying everything they make You're a public institution you're building a collection that's going

to be useful for the future so you can't put all your money on the poor ones but the poor ones are every bit as brilliant as the really really successful ones from our objective point of view so this is a problem that I have and we produce these people in our art schools uh we've got very good art schools in Canada so there's a population uh of artists who are coming out of our art schools Who as A society we cannot support we can only support a very tiny fraction so for for me the solution

is we need creative people in other professions can they be Consultants to help other professions be successful well if you you know if you're a business and you're and you're facing problems that you don't know how to solve it's creative people that you want to that you want to consult with because they will think laterally I mean you you asked about the Psychometric definition of creativity earlier I mean imagine that people it's a very complicated concept to get across properly but um you know if you think about musical genres you can imagine that there are

people who work very well within a type musical genre okay they're creative but only creative within the confines of that genre but there are multiple genres if you're super creative you would be able to be creative across multiple Genres right and so what that means is that you can always step outside the box you're in and think outside of it and that's what creative people do and and and so if you're if you're trapped in your box you're your company is going down the drain for example because your product is no longer useful um you

need someone who can come in and think laterally which is what entrepreneurs do I mean one of the Hallmarks of an entrepreneurial thinker it's sort of Entered the jargon of of of the venture capitalist Sphere for example is that an entrepreneur has to be able to Pivot so let's say you have an Entre you're an entrepreneur you want to bring an idea to Market and you have your idea it's welldeveloped you go out in the market you find there's no market for that idea which is what's going to happen to all your creative ideas by

the way because matching them with the market well matching them with the market is Exceptionally difficult because you have to be there at the right time and in the right place you have to be brilliant you have to come up with a product that's not easy then people have to want it and they have to want it now and often that means if you're first to Market you're dead because you can't even advertise your damn product because there's no lexicon for it how do you sell something to people that they don't even know exists so

that's the the first person in A in a brand new field dies for sure you need 10 people out there advertising it before anybody can be successful but the entrepreneurs they in their early stage they have to Pivot and what that means is that if their first idea doesn't work because it doesn't fit the market for example they have to be able to generate another one on the Fly and creative people that's what they do you know they're problem solvers and and if you want creative problem solvers then you Hire creative people now you if

you hired artists you would get creative people in so far as the art schools are able to select creative people and there's self- selection so they they they select creative people and posers you know well let's talk about the posers how how can a an art collector let's say who doesn't trust dealers and really is only interested in their own eye and they go around and they're and they're looking at all the Various Galleries and they're they're building their own collection which is unusual by the way because they do rely a lot on the dealers

they never ask my opinion but anyway um how do you know the difference between a poser someone who's just merely clever and someone who's authentically creative and is and is original and is moving the story forward if you don't have very much experience in the game by the way I'm an expert in that it's easy it's easy you Just wait 200 years you just wait until 200 years after they're dead yeah and then skim off the top Yeah we actually think of ourselves those who work in art museums and spending public money on uh exhibitions

and and collections we We Talk Amongst ourselves and we're very careful about about winnowing through the people who are also rans posers or who are not actually going to be the ones who are going to make that flag that will remind everyone of 2017 versus the ones who are well when you when you're trying what's the real art history of Canada is it with these artists or that one when you're trying to do that I mean okay so first of all we we'll assume that you're a creative person and I think that's a reasonable assumption

to make and then we'll also assume that you're very well educated in the history of art so you're in a good position because you can tell when something's been done before right and You also know the difference between something that's been done well and something that hasn't so in order to do the selection process properly then you'd have to be creative you have to have the intelligence and the temperament for it and that's the capability of perceiving it so you're saying I'm creative well it's highly probable because otherwise the probability that you'd be in this

position and interested in it you Actually like art I do well there you go so so so I mean if you don't like art you're probably not creative and if you genuinely like it and then it isn't even liking it's like you can't live without it and that's that's a whole different thing and it's very difficult for people who aren't like that to understand it you know and and I and but if you are like that then art speaks to you and and it speaks this language of tremendous Beauty and continual Revelation and you Can

educate yourself obviously you do that by I would say mostly studying well studying philosophy literature all the artistic domains the humanities make yourself a connoisseur and Ally that with your temperament and you have a reasonable chance at selecting things that aren't that at least aren't duplicates of what's been happening before right what I normally tell people is get your own information and work hard uh uh study hard uh if this is Going to be a serious hobby of yours and you're going to be investing a lot of money in it get your own information right

well and people are ter like you people are absolutely terrified of art they're absolutely terrified of which is why their favorite Canadians favorite decorating color is beige it's like really it's like don't paint your w W red because you'll never be able to resell your house it's like everybody accepts that as a truth it's like you Know people can paint walls it's a rather foolish piece but people are terrified that they'll make a an aesthetically displeasing choice and that everyone will laugh at them and so they stick with beige and they really are frightened of

they really are frightened of Art and no wonder they should be so now why should they be frightened of art because it speaks of the ultimate depths if it's real art it brings it into your it brings it into Your house man you know people come I got like 600 paintings in my house every square inch of the house is covered with paintings and you know it's quite a shock for people when they come in well cuz some of them are of lenon so surprisingly enough I've I've been in your house Jordan and a lot

of them are of Lenin yes yes well I collected a bunch of Soviet realist art because I have interest in Totalitarianism so but I have anyways my walls are completely covered with art and not as a Nostalgia it's not a nostal it's not a Nostalgia thing no it might be a prophetic thing though oh dear well let's not go down that road um I want to talk about being a parent and you don't know whether you have a creative child or not what is the wrong way to be a parent if you have a creative

child and you don't know it and what's the right way I mean you're a Parent well here's a here's a good thing to do if you want to have a creative genius as a as a an adult child die before you're there 10 that helps a lot so there's quite a extensive lit so if you're inclined to do that suicide would really do it because now explain explain that please yeah well there there's a there's a famous psychologist named Hans ISAC who who was the most highly cited psychologist in The world for a long time

and for all I know still may be um he wrote a great book called genius which is a real study of of creativity it's the real thing and so people just hate it because it's not full of you know platitudes that will make you feel good you know he says to be truly creative you have to have a near genius level IQ and that sort of puts you in the one in 1,000 range so that's kind of annoying to begin with that might be me I don't Know and and so but but he's also found

that early early traumatic experiences are good predictors of late um of late creativity now now we should also say that early traumatic experiences are also great predictors of catastrophic adult lives so but you can imagine the thing that people don't understand about creativity or one of them is that um there's no reason to be creative unless you have a problem to solve and you know if if someone dies on You young and you're forced to fend your way in the world and to deal with that kind of trauma you have to you have to put

yourself together in a creative Manner and it's no joke and so early negative experiences allied with high intelligence and this kind of temperament that we were talking about is one of the things that Fosters creative production and you know parents are misinformed about this sort of thing because they think that if they they Just do LZ Fair things with their children you know you can do anything you want they'll automatically be creative it's like that's the stupidest thing you could possibly imagine because that isn't how creativity Works creative creativity emerges when you put serious constraints

on things and so a good example of that like a symbolic example is the example of the genie you know and the word Genie is at the root of the word genius so they're not nicely tied Together and you a genie is this tremendous Godlike force encapsulated in this tiny little space and in order for the genie to be able to grant wishes it has to be both constrained extraordinarily tightly and be without constraint at the same time it's the conjunction of those two things and so in order to have someone be creative you have

to set them a difficult problem you know great literary figures dovy tolto people like that Shakespeare man they're Solving tough tough problems and someone like Picasso he invented an entirely new way to see it's like try that that's visual artist Brock did but he worked very closely with Brock anyway sorry I didn't mean to be a nerd here but fair enough um so let's go back to this this trauma thing what if you are uh you your personality traits point to conservative 10-year-old and your parent dies what happens to you do you automatically become creative

or are you out of luck You just spiral into the abyss and there's go no I would say that what a conservative child would does that make you creative uh not very unlikely I mean a lot of these these things are more biologically determined than people like to like to admit and I mean what if you're introverted try turning yourself into an extrovert see how well that works it's good luck like if you have a really introverted child you can make that Child socially skilled and able to tolerate interactions with groups but the probability that

you'll make that child like it is so low so low because introverts for example get exhausted by social contact so those of you in the audience you think well you go to a party are you do you have more energy afterwards or less if the answer is well far less I need to go sit in a dark room with an ice pack on my head then you know then you're more introverted and It's very difficult to move that you you can but it's very hard and creativity is the same way it's it's you can you

can crush it you can crush it Crush creativity sure that's easy and we do that all the time and and you usually pretty happy about it too so but give us an example of how to crush creativity so we don't do quit daydreaming oh my God yes I remember that's the same thing it's saying quit being creative that's the same thing quit daydreaming it's Like yeah quit using your imagination that you're bringing back bad memories now Jordan yeah well schools do that all the time stop daydreaming and and and you know pay attention to your

work it's like well what if my work is daydreaming well then then we're going to punish you because you're going to be a good worker in a factory oh yeah those disappeared 100 years ago I guess we haven't noticed yet oh well too bad for us and our children right and our future for that Matter because it's it's unbelievably boneheaded but you know once once the system gets established it tends to persist and so well that's how it is but it's pretty sad so where are the creative people in our society there we know that

they're artists so they're Starving in Garretts yeah well uh or are they are they working at McDonald's uh no like lot the like uh how about Bill Gates he did all right Steve jobes he did all right no but I mean so what are The what are the the professions the P people get to be creative in their jobs uh because we you know we we've got this professional deformation that makes us think that only artists are creative and everybody else is just just watching well entrepreneurs for sure so so people who start companies they're

the same people they're the same people as artists and you know they're more Gadget oriented usually but the temperamental predictors are exactly the same and so I Would say you find you find artist creative people among over represented among people who you might regard as failures over their life course and radically overrepresented among people that you would regard as spectacularly successful and that's the high-risk High return gambling strategy essentially so um we've eliminated lawyers and accountants Bankers you can throw them out too bankers yeah are gone any managerial and administrative position Is is basically is

generally very low creative wow I may writers Artists Movie Makers literary people um I wouldn't say professors we we did we did uh a study a while back predicting um what graduate Stu student a uh attributes predicted um scientific success creativity was negatively correlated um well it's because again science is an algorithmic machine right that's that's why it's so powerful is that you can get people who aren't creative but who will work hard And they crank the levers and out comes knowledge and and it's an extraordinarily powerful technology but um you can't get creative things

published you can get incrementally better things published creative things is like no one has any idea what to do with them and the non-creative people will think no that's rubbish it's like they don't know any better but it's very very hard to evaluate are you creative see my socks yeah no That wasn't you that was Van go yeah but I like I picked them out actually my wife pick actually my wife picked them out but I'll wear them yes I'm creative um I wanted to to ask you and I think we have a bit of

time left I wanted to get in a little bit deeper uh some of the controversies that we have lived through in the past year at the National Gallery let's talk about voice of fire for example um and one of the arguments was well there's no Skill involved where's the creativ ity and um that's from my point of view it's very easy to answer following what you've just said Barnet Newman uh who was a lousy painter wasn't even interested in painting was actually one of the most important artists of the 20th century gave himself these constraints

these he really really restricted his field of operation to vertical stripes and uh with a a sort of metaphorical connection to humanity and Our and our vertical aspirations is can we talk about creativity when we're getting into an area of extreme constraint on the part of an artist a minimalist who paints uh um let's just say someone like uh there's a very famous polish artist whose Name Escapes me right now but it's going to somebody's going to yell that out um who counted for his entire life and then took a picture of himself every 10

years um and and just counted until The color ran out and then he starts over with another color and his name is not coming to me okay but so if you're looking at this objectively conceptually it's really quite powerful and unique and these paintings uh there's one at the Art Gallery of Ontario and we will always regret not having one here at the National Gallery we're not likely to have one he died um and they're quite sought after can you still talk about creativity when someone has a great idea In 1964 and then just proceeds

to produce that idea and replicate the same thing for the rest of their lives I'm getting getting into the deep psychoanalysis of creativity okay well there's a couple of things I would say about that the first is is that people were upset about that painting because they think that art is decoration they thought well you know that's not decoration or they think that I would I'd be able to do that which they Wouldn't by the way because it's a lot harder than it sounds or than it looks but art is not decoration that's absolutely foolish

art is exploration and artists train people to see like you know when when when the most of you would I presume would regard um impressionist art as both self-evidently beautiful and also as um relatively tra traditional because of course you all now see like Impressionists see all of you that are even vaguely train even Vaguely part of the 20th century you can't help it because the impressionist aesthetic saturated everything saturated advertisements saturated movies saturated everything you now see like an impressionist they taught you to see but back when the Impressionists first showed up there were

riots when their art was hung because the the idea of perceiv that way was so radical that it caused people to have emotional fits you know and so artists teach people to see And I mean that literally it's very hard to perceive the world and so and and who was the artist that that made all the squares with red and yellow and white Pete mandre mandrian he's a great example I mean if you go into if you go downtown Toronto now there are mandrian buildings everywhere you know and so he was playing very very carefully

and intensely with these with these arrays of geometric shapes you know and that's not de well I like it but it's not Particularly decorative and it's certainly not naturalistic or realistic it's like what's this crazy guy up to with all his squares it's like well everything is built out of squares so he's thinking well what are the interesting things we can do with squares so they look they they Shimmer and glow and and so that we get the geometric Harmony proper and it's just invaded architecture you can see you can see mandrian absolutely everywhere and

So these people so here's a way of thinking about artistic and creative people from an from a biological perspective so imagine that the world is basically um an explored territory inside an unexplored territory every world is like that everywhere you go is like that there's things you know and there's things you don't know and the conservative people like to be in the middle of the things that are known it's it's and and they can master that Space and they're good at maintaining it but the artist like to be right out on the edge and that's

the edge between Chaos and Order and they like to expand the dimen the domain of order out into the chaos and they do that first by transforming perception but and you can see very concrete examples of this if you think about what creative people do in cities they always do it the same thing so they they're at the they're starving to death and this is partly why But they look they go in a city and they look at some ratty area that's sort of Quasi criminal and that's seen better days and they go there and

they think you know with a little work this could be cool and so then they rush in there and they build some Galleries and show some art and they civilize it a bit and then a coffee shop pops up and you know the next next thing you know the the the yuppies move in because they're sort of creative but also kind of conservative So they're the next ones into the frontier and then the developers show up and they kick all the artists out but that's that's okay because then artists go off and rejuvenate some other

area and that's what artists do is that they're transforming chaos into order all the time that's where they live they live on that edge and so it's a very tough place to live because you can fall into the chaos at any time this is kind of blowing my mind actually because I Just wrote recently um in the commemorative book for the 150th here at the gallery that uh science uh helps us understand the world whereas artists create a world that we can understand it's just the they they sort of Opp it amounts to the same

but they're they're opposite approaches the said that artists have always been on the frontier of human understanding you know the artist Bears the same relationship to society that the dream Bears to to Mental life like when you're dreaming at night you're actually pretty creative when you're dreaming and that's why when you remember your dream you think oh man like where did that come from which is pretty weird a that something can happen in your head and you have no idea how it got there or what it means that's a bloody Miracle you know every night

that happens it's like I had a dream where did it come from what does it mean that you had it how can you not understand it How can you produce something like that it's like a whole movie that you don't even understand you produce it you don't produce it you experience it the dream is the thing that mediates between order and care chaos it starts to make chaos into order so it's half chaos that's why it's not comprehensible and artists play exactly the same role in society they're The Visionaries that start to transform what we

don't understand into at least what we can start to see and they've Always been that they've always been at the Vanguard that's their biological Niche so they're creating confidence for the community they're they're they're the civilizing agents I mean look at Europe think about and this is one of the things that really bothers me about bothers me about the fact that conservative people have a hard time properly valuing art economically it's so paradoxical because conservatives are very concerned about economics it's like Okay fine then why don't you fund the damn artists because you look Europe

Europe is so beautiful that it's just heartbreaking when you go there I mean there's I've been to to like medieval villages in Germany for example that just made me cry when I saw them they're so damn beautiful and the beauty that the Europeans has have produced is is it's it's it's infinitely valuable people go from all over the world on pilgrimages to Europe just to look at Beautiful things it nourishes their soul they're they're they're Priceless they're Paris is priceless Rome is priceless and it's all beauty that drives it it's phenomenally valuable and Canada is

just ugly as Sin man really okay really we should be as are not going to get an argument from me on that subject um what's wrong with us I come my my family there were some creative people my father was an actor my mother Was not uh she was very utilitarian why are we as a society so utilitarian because we really are is it are we still in survival mode because it's so cold I don't understand that because we actually produce probably more brilliant artists per capita than than a lot of other countries in the

world I would say most in fact what's wrong with our city it's it's a really really complicated question I mean I've really asked myself that in Toronto cuz I mean I like Toronto but like art from from an aesthetic perspective it's like not good not good at all it's getting better I mean there's some creative buildings coming up in Toronto and and so some of it is I think a function of population size you know you need a pretty wicked population center before you start getting a lot of creative occurrences happening but there's an there's

an intrinsic middle of the radness that characterizes Canadian society that Makes it nice I suppose which is a very low-end virtue in my estimation it's like what's my moral virtue I'm fundamentally harmless Jesus you think you could do better than that so I had an experience with that at the University of Toronto that that that I'll tell you about because I think it's extraordinarily comical and then I'll tell you a little story about how I figured how I figured it out I spent a bunch of time with this artist I told You about trying to

transform my cinder block hellhole fluorescent lit Factory catastrophe of an office into something that someone with some sense could sit in for 30 years without dying and so I I got this artist to to act as a cons does employer know your feelings about this yes definitely yes they know my feelings about a lot of things actually so I brought this artist in and and he has yeah I love Consulting with Him because he was he he liked to do really spectacular things for no money which is a lovely set of constraints we we were

going to cover the cinder block walls with cherry plywood good one side and then buff it and and varnish it so it have wood panel office and then he was going to paint the drop ceilings Jesus there are hell is a place of dropped ceilings and fluorescent lights and so he was going to paint this them with this paint Called hammerite that looks like uh uh beaten steel with dries yeah yeah we had these really cool ideas and had a budget of like $1,200 so we're going to completely transform the office for $1,200 and I

talked to the former chair of the psychology department about this who I had some discussions with about transforming the the psychology department from this like my my my creative brother-in-law who designed the chip in the iPhone by the way um he Called the architecture hos and what he meant by was that anything of any sort could happen in that building and you could just hose it down it would be okay it's like God so so my my my my former chair was sort of sensitive to this sort of thing so we had a bit of

a talk about about maybe doing some Transformations and I thought that this person was on board but then when I when I asked I I was sharing this excitedly and this person said well you can't do that and I Thought I shook my head and I thought okay I'm going to make something ugly better fast with no trouble for no money and your response is you can't do that and I thought okay well I said well why not and the person said um cuz everyone would want it and I thought I thought two things a

oh we're in kindergarten and and B oh I'm talking to someone insane so so then I changed my conversational tack quite substantially and I I had to Default to plan B which made my office very colorful it's got like dro kind of copper ceiling and it's full of paintings and people come in and they're you know it's a place of beauty and and creativity and and not a bloody horrible fluorescent lit Factory and I had to fight for that a lot it was weird and then I found out afterwards that for a while the university

the department would bring new potential hires into my Office to show them the office to show them what was possible at the University of Toronto so I thought that was so comical but anyways anyways I I do have a point of this story cuz I thought about that for a long time I thought God people are afraid of what I'm doing in this office well and for good reason I guess but um I thought there's something to this that I don't understand there's really something to this so then I came across this story by Robert

spolski I Think it was Robert zapolski and he was talking about zebras and so I'll take two minutes and tell you the zebrra story because if you understand this story you understand absolutely everything about human beings and so it's worth 2 minutes so so you know zebras hypothetically are camouflaged right that's what everyone says but come on really lions are camouflaged they're the same color as the grass zebras are black and white you can see one of those Things like a mile away but there isn't a zebra there's a herd of zebras and so the

zebras actually camouflaged against the herd now that's something to think about so the stripes of zebras are the zebras jargon that's a good way of thinking about it yeah no kidding no kidding so anyways so biologists go out and study zebras and zebra biologists and they're going to they got to watch a zebra to figure out what it's up to and so they watch a Zebra and then they make a note and then they look up and they think oh my God like which collection of black and white stripes was that zebra cuz the stripes

don't outline the zebra and they camouflage the zebra perfectly against the herd so if you look away from the zebra down and back up you don't know what you're looking at so the biologists think oh we better we better solve this problem so they drive up to the herd with a Jeep and a bucket of red paint And a stick with a rag on the end of it and they they paint one of the zebras haunches with a red spot or they clip its ear like you do with cattle then you can keep track of

the zebra guess what happens to the zebra the lions eat it oh right oh is Right bloody right oh yeah the Lions cannot hunt a single zebra down unless they can identify it because they organize their hunt they have to organize their hunt around four zebras You can only at time you you can't hunt a blur of zebras and so the reason they go after the little ones are the ones that limp isn't because you know they're part of kind nature and just calling the weak that they like a nice healthy delicious juicy zebra as

much as the next person you know so so but they they have to be able to identify so the thing is is you make yourself colorful you stand out the Lions will kill you aha right well Canadians we don't like to stand out we like everybody to do okay but we don't like it very much when people stand out and so and I mean I'm not being entirely critical of that I really do understand it I really do understand it because there's Lions out there you guys there are there that's right and there there definitely

are and if you stick your neck out then the Lions will come or the sword because that's a common saying right the head That sticks Up Above the Rest is the first to be cut out cut off by the sword many many cultures have a saying like that the poppy that grows higher than the rest is the syndrome exactly exactly and so and it's exactly right it's it's biologically correct now why Canadians are particularly prone to that I don't know if we are particularly prone to it but we certainly have hideous cities and we should

be embarrassed about it because we have the Wealth to make them beautiful and the return on that investment would be absolutely unparalleled so but and it's something that if people understood the relationship properly between creativity and econom then we wouldn't have to have an ideological discussion about creativity right because a practical one we'd have a practical one it's like well I don't think much of artists says the lawyer But they generate a lot of income and I'm pretty happy about money it's like okay maybe we can have maybe we can have a discussion and um

on that note Jordan I wanted to uh thank you so much for I'm going to go to bed much less of an idiot tonight as we say in French uh thank you for enlightening us on the psychology of creativity and about creativity and and um and I would invite everyone to go out and make more Beauty in our city yes [Applause]