creativity

There used to be quite a lot of creative jobs around

But they've been disappearing since at least the middle of the 19th century

In that century the English art critic and social reformer

John Ruskin pointed out that the medieval building industry had once left its builders-- room for a huge amount of creativity

evident in the way that these craftsmen had had fun carving

Gargoyles grotesque animal or human faces in distinctive shapes high up on cathedral roofs

The stonemasons might have had to work to a fixed overall design and their toil was not always easy

but the gargoyle symbolized a fundamental freedom seen in many kinds of

Pre-industrial work the freedom to place a personal creative stamp on one's work

Nowadays, there are some creative jobs around of course

but the majority of those involved in

Making and selling say phones or furniture or buildings will have no opportunity to be creative

themselves

They belong instead to a highly anonymous army of labour

Working with in vast companies and that executes the creative designs of a lucky few

Modern capitalism has radically reduced the number of jobs which retain any component of creativity in them

Take for example. The Eames chair designed by Charles and Ray Eames

Which went into production in?

1956 it is a highly distinctive creation that deeply reflects the ideals and outlook of the couple who designed it if

They'd been artisans operating their own small workshop

They would perhaps have sold a few dozen such chairs to their local customers in a lifetime

instead because they worked under modern capitalism many hundreds of thousands of chairs have been and

Continue to be sold

That's wonderful in a sense but a side effect of this triumph has been that the demand for well-designed

interesting chairs has been

substantially cornered a

New creative person wanting to make a new kind of office chair nowadays has to face the fact that it's already possible

To buy a very nice example

Designed by two geniuses and available for rapid delivery at a competitive price in other words

You won't stand too much chance of success

We're familiar with the idea that the wealth of the world is being ever more tightly

concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of people

the infamous

1% but capitalism doesn't only concentrate money

There's a more poignant less familiar fact that it's only a small number of people are sometimes

Overlapping but often different 1% who can have interesting that is creative work

It's telling that we are at this point in history

Obsessed with the romance of individual creative geniuses our society has developed an ear

fetishistic interest in stories of brilliant startups colorful fashion gurus and idiosyncratic

Filmmakers we might like to think we're turning to them for inspiration

But it may be more the case that we are using them to compensate us for a painful gap in our own lives

Just as it was in the 19th century during mass migration to cities that novels and pictures about country life

achieved unprecedented popularity

among newly urban audiences

The many interviews and profiles of creative types in the media at the moment

mask the fact that for almost all of us it will prove almost impossible to compete against the forces of

standardization

Far more than because of anything we may ourselves have done most of us are highly likely to find a considerable portion of our work

free of opportunities to carve our own gargoyles and

Therefore will find it distinctly boring

We are certainly richer now than we've ever been and then we ever were in a pre-industrial world

But our work is arguably a lot less filled with day to day

Opportunities to mark what we're making with a stamp of our own creative spark

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