Art, creation and creativity: between usefulness and uselessness in Western epistemology

Abstract

For both the common sense and the academic, creation and creativity are, respectively, a principle privileged by the field of art and a skill developed mainly by artists. Thus, art has been considered the activity par excellence in which imagination and creativity seem inseparable. This conception was built up in its entirety throughout the 19th century. However, taking into account the history of art itself, artists and theorists have not always taken for granted this alliance between imagination and creativity in the process of artistic production, because there were (and are) thinkers who defend the idea that artistic creation/creation would be useless in the human being's dealings with the world and with life and, above all, in the constitution of knowledge.

The aim of this article is to explain how the concepts of creation in art have been constructed historically. Plato did not recognise in the art of his time any inventive principle, but rather a principle of simulation completely unnecessary for knowledge, while Aristotle, on the contrary, perceived in the mimetic attitude a cognitive potentiality common and necessary to all human beings. In the Renaissance, creating meant above all recreating and resignifying the principles of classical art, applying them to the modern context. However, it was in this period that the artist became fully aware that his work, rather than technical and stylistic repetition, required creativity in the approach to the subject matter, especially when that subject matter was well known. Along with this idea of creation, the idea of the artist as an inventive genius began to emerge.