Daniel Pink and the Economic Model of Creativity

"Out drunk, again."

Pink used lots of squishy phrases to keep himself clear of speaking too directly about artistic creativity in particular. He talked about how we need to "reason aesthetically." He quoted General Motors executive Robert Lutz saying, "We are in the arts and entertainment business," by which Lutz probably meant, "We're in the design and marketing business."

It's not even clear that one wants the economy led by people who are generically multitalented, or, as Pink says, "multi-taskers." Consider the sad reputation of the Roman emperor Gallienus.

"In every art that he attempted his lively genius enabled him to succeed," writes Edward Gibbon in "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Every art, unfortunately, except the arts of war and government. "He was a master of several curious but useless sciences, a ready orator and elegant poet, a skilful gardener, an excellent cook, and most contemptible prince."

Artists aren't by necessity contemptible princes, or contemptible accountants, lawyers or CEOs. And to be fair, despite insisting that things such as seeing the big picture and synthesizing large amounts of information are artistic abilities, Pink wasn't really talking about the arts or artists. A joke he borrowed from Sid Caesar shows what Pink really means.

"The guy who invented the wheel? He was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three? He was a genius."

Funny stuff. And it shows how Pink defines the kind of creativity that he thinks is the right-brain panacea for the new economy. It's Tom Sawyer's basic skill set, the ability to persuade people to pay you for the privilege of painting your fence. It's an exploitative cleverness that has very little to do with artistic skill.

To be fair, there are people in the corporate world who are interested in learning different paradigms for thinking. There are efforts to teach doctors better diagnostic skills through honing their responses to art. Artistic skill, so long as it's not attached to a socially dysfunctional personality, is no impediment to financial or other left-brain kinds of success. And most artists have day jobs, at which many of them are highly successful.

Philosophers and aestheticians have spent centuries trying to define what distinguishes artistic skill from other forms of intelligence. One can't blame Pink for not having a better definition than the sloppy ones he used Monday. But it's a bit disturbing to think that the people who run our arts organizations are happy to sit through a lecture by someone who casually suggests that artistic skill is essentially the same thing as good design, or thinking outside the box, or exploiting opportunity in new ways. One hopes they believe artistic skill is much more than that.