Walking to work, he used to pass her every day, going in the opposite direction. She didn’t seem so interesting at first, but he became increasingly curious about her. He started to look forward to seeing her. He became attentive to details, to the way she moved, to what she was carrying, what she was wearing, her ever-changing moods. Even though they never spoke, he became a little obsessed. Then, when he confessed his fascination to a friend, they said, ‘Oh, that’s Alice; everyone thinks she’s amazing’, and he was gutted. He thought something special in her spoke to something special in him. He thought he alone was alert to her charms and would champion them. I think often that’s how good art works, how it wheedles its way into our heads and gets under our skin. It doesn’t address us directly but our engagement with it builds over time, gently, inevitably. We think we have some special, privileged rapport with it, that our appreciation of it makes us unique, that we picked it out of the crowd. We feel flattered that we noticed it, that we ‘get it’, only to find it has the same effect on almost every one.
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The art world is alight with feel-good rhetoric about ‘creativity’. We celebrate it as intrinsically beneficial. But creativity looks less benign outside the white cube in the real world, where its consequences can be dire. Take the American mechanical and chemical engineer Thomas J. Midgely. Granted more than a hundred patents, he was clearly rather creative. He will be particularly remembered for two creations: leaded petrol and chlorofluorocarbons. Both were later banned due to their disastrous impact on people and the planet. Midgely has been described as a ‘one-man environmental disaster’ with ‘more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history’. Interestingly, he would be a victim of his own creativity. In 1940, aged 51, he contracted polio and devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed. Four years later, he became entangled in the device and died of strangulation. Thought experiment: If you had a TARDIS, would you go back and eliminate Midgely before he created his bad things and thus save the world? If so, would that make you a creativity killer?
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