A Practitioner Concept of Contemporary Creativity

Creativity in Three Academic Areas

Academic accounts of creativity can be loosely categorized according to disciplines and their corresponding foci or projects. The humanities tend to study creative products or outputs; sociology explores the social organization associated with creativity, including institutions and occupations; and psychology and business studies share a concern with the modeling of creativity and creative processes to facilitate practical applications. However, that categorization omits connections between disciplines and some influential interdisciplinary work. This section explores the conceptualizations of creativity in three broad academic areas: the sociology of art, the psychology of creativity, and recent research on the global sector of the cultural and creative industries (CCI). The section reviews differences and connections between the conceptualizations.

The association of creativity with the arts, and particularly elite “high arts” like painting and sculpture, carries positive connotations, for instance, of culture and civilization. A leading CCI academic suggests that “Since the Renaissance—and especially since the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century—there has been a widespread tendency to think of ‘art’ as being one of the highest forms of human creativity” (Hesmondhalgh 2007: 4). In a classic sociological study of the social institutions, practices, and meanings of art, Howard S. Becker (1982:14) summarizes what he calls, critically, the “myth of the artist”: “Both participants in the creation of art works and members of society generally believe that the making of art requires special talents, gifts, or abilities, which few have.” This image is not, of course, presented as a factual description. Becker’s interest was in the social processes and “art worlds” that sustain art in Western societies. The myth is significant as a “historical imaginary” (Gerber 2017:28) of creative lives and work, perpetuating recognizable associations of art, an artistic life, and therefore artistic creativity.

Becker (1982:14) suggests that another aspect of the myth is the artist’s freedom to “violate rules of decorum, propriety, and common sense everyone else must follow or risk being punished.” This violation follows from the elevation of the artistic vocation over more conventional priorities like earning a living and supporting dependents. Art becomes an end in itself, transcending ordinary life and its pressures to conform. The myth can be expanded to extend this specialness to the artist’s lifestyle, particularly invoking a nineteenth-century European artist (White and White [1965] 1993). He lives in poverty, outside conventional society, probably in a European city like Paris. He pursues his vocation, following inspiration and struggling to achieve artistic fulfilment through his art. Other rewards, like recognition and riches, may be postponed indefinitely and only come posthumously. The pronouns are intentional because this is a masculine image (Bain 2004). It also largely excludes non-Western art.

This image of the artist is said to have stimulated mid–twentieth century developments in the psychology of creativity. Sarah Brouillette (2013) argues that in the postwar period, creativity was seen as necessary for America’s economic development. Future industries were expected to rely on innovators, and the image of the artist informed an ideal of a new worker as an creative nonconformist who could live with uncertainty. Somewhat differently, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2014) suggests that the prompting came from the US Air Force, who wanted a creativity test for prospective pilots to reduce errors caused by uncreative, “by the book” responses to emergencies. A historian of science, Jamie Cohen-Cole (2009), proposes that aspects of the artist’s image became associated with American national interests. He argues that postwar political threats of authoritarianism and Communism were both associated with conformity, rigidity, a lack of autonomy, and people’s failure to think for themselves. In contrast, an American style and way of life were assumed to be characterized by freedom of thought and diversity. Creativity was seen as an aspect of an “open, autonomous mind” and also “democratic character” (Cohen-Cole 2009:237). The creative individual therefore came to be seen as the protector of American values, again implicitly aligned with the nonconformist artist.

Psychologists suggest that creativity is a capacity or potential that is possessed by everyone, at least to some degree. Abraham Maslow (1962) links it to “self-actualization” at the top of the human “hierarchy of needs.” Csikszentmihalyi (Csikszentmihalyi and Sawyer 2002) connects creativity to the “optimal” or “flow” experience all people aspire to. Csikszentmihalyi’s systems approach shifts the focus from the creative individual to a creative process in which three “systems” act on each other. The first is the person who creates something new, like an idea; the second is the cultural context or “domain” of knowledge and conventions to which that new idea might contribute (e.g., by solving a problem); and the third is the social “field” of relevant people who can assess the new idea, pass it on, for example, through teaching, and generally define the domain.

In the arts, the person would be the artist or practitioner; the domain the specific area of creative practice, including the earlier work that informs it; and the field the community or network of audiences, critics, dealers, and academic experts corresponding broadly to the “art world” described by Becker (1982). ¹ Becker’s emphasis on social worlds is taken up in sociological systems approaches (e.g., Burns, Machado, and Corte 2015; Parker and Corte 2017) that emphasize the social embeddedness of creative processes. Such an approach takes account of collective actors and social structures and institutions. There is a greater emphasis on the creative output attaining social acceptance. Sawyer (2003:124) distinguishes the filtering and selection that occurs in the creative interaction of a group (“synchronic”) from “the longer term, diachronic interaction characteristic of scientific and artistic creativity.” Burns et al. (2015:182) also reduce the focus on application because their approach does not require or assume that an innovation will be “useful, adaptive, valuable, [or] appropriate.”

These theorists, and others, have stimulated an enormous amount of psychological research, for instance, to “describe and model” the process and “enhance creativity through process training” (Lubart 2018). As Brouillette (2013) indicates, psychology has been particularly concerned with the practical applications of creativity. It is assumed to have utility in a broad, even mundane range of activities, from chess playing (Amabile 1983) to business and management. (Of course, the arts themselves can be argued to have practical uses, for instance, as markers of wealth and power, but these tend not to be included in the myth of the artist.) Following the systems approach, some psychologists have looked at creative groups. Keith Sawyer (2003, 2007) used jazz bands and drama companies as models for workplace teams that develop new products. Socio-cultural psychologists propose that creativity arises in collaborative relationships, like literary and scientific partnerships (John-Steiner 2000; see also Glaveanu and Tanggaard 2014). Psychology has therefore challenged the conceptualization of creativity as a special or elite quality possessed only by artists and a few other genius-type individuals. Creativity becomes a near-universal capacity arising in complex contexts and valued not as an end in itself (“art for art’s sake”) but for its practical applications, particularly in the workplace.

The supposed utility of creativity underpinned the identification of the cultural and creative industries (CCI; Hesmondhalgh 2007, O’Connor 2010). Definitions of the CCI are varied and fluid. An influential British government account lists the creative industries as conventionally “artistic” areas (“architecture, the art and antiques markets, crafts, design . . . music, the performing arts”) but also “interactive leisure software, . . . software and computer services, television and radio” (Department of Culture, Media and Sport [DCMS] 2001). The common feature of industries in this sector is supposedly that wealth is generated through the “individual creativity, skill and talent” of their workers (DCMS 2001). Creativity subsequently became linked to “virtually all the performative labors producing the information economy, from computer coding to legal research” (Fuller, Hamilton, and Seale 2013:144). Moreover, creative practitioners came to be seen as drivers of urban regeneration after the arrival of artists and musicians apparently initiated the gentrification of depressed industrial areas in New York and Manchester in the 1980s (O’Connor 2010). This led to the now common practice of local or national governments building a new art gallery or cultural center to stimulate a local economy. ²

Within contemporary organizations, creativity is valued for contributing to the future-focused adaptation associated with neoliberalism (Adkins and Jokinen 2008). In addition, creativity and its supposed rewards are associated with self-employment in almost any occupation (Taylor 2015b). There are obvious overlaps between the images of the creative worker and the entrepreneur (Ahl 2006; Brockling 2016) as individuals who can develop new projects and monetize their creativity. The entrepreneur is more strongly associated with business success, whereas the creative worker, analogous with the artist, accepts precarity, enduring uncertain earnings and postponed reward (Gill and Pratt 2008) out of “love of the work.” ³ As career trajectories have become less predictable (Sennett 1998), employment less secure (Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy 2017), and potential has acquired a greater value than experience (Adkins and Jokinen 2008), the image of the artist again informs an ideal of the contemporary worker, as it did in the mid–twentieth century period discussed by Brouillette (2013).

The CCI sector therefore brings together conceptualizations of creativity from both psychology and the arts. The expectation that creativity has practical applications and can be monetized is informed by the psychology of creativity. The positive image of creative work and an associated lifestyle derives from the elite arts. For practitioners themselves, the myth of the artist outlined by Becker (1982) persists as an attraction (McRobbie 2016). Andreas Reckwitz (2017) argues that creativity provides a motivation for contemporary workers that was previously excluded. He suggests that in the modernist period, there was an emphasis on rationality and purpose that reduced workers to passive information processors. In contrast, in our new aestheticized society, people have become active creative subjects, seeking “fascination and satisfaction” and “stimuli and excitement” from their work (Reckwitz 2017:11).

Conflicting Conceptualizations of Creativity

There is some overlap in how creativity is understood in the three academic areas that have been reviewed, in part because one has informed another. However, there are also significant differences and even conflicts in their conceptualizations of creativity. One point of difference concerns people’s capacity to be creative. The myth of the artist implies that a special talent is required. Although the sociology of art has largely avoided debate about whether such a talent actually exists (see Banks 2017; Born 2010), the assumption is considered significant: creativity retains the mystique deriving from the myth of the artist as a person with special gifts. In contrast, psychology democratizes creativity, approaching it as a normal human capacity or potential that can be modeled and fostered (Caroff and Lubart 2012). For creative practitioners, this issue of capacity potentially relates to their own claims to be creative. It is an interesting paradox that psychologists tend to introduce their research on creativity with references to elite individuals and practices, invoking the specialness that they are simultaneously countering. ⁴

A related issue concerns the status of creativity. It is variously conceptualized as an observable, even measurable phenomenon and an attribution that is powerful principally because of the (possibly false) promise it carries. Becker’s (1982) sociology of art does not attempt to pin down the artistic or the creative as separable from its social contexts. His focus is on the social conditions that contribute to the ascription of creativity, that is, the relationships and circumstances that facilitate or obstruct the categorization of some practitioners, practices, and outputs as belonging to art worlds. In contrast, psychology largely assumes that creativity can be identified and studied in practices, or practitioners, or both. The original identification of the CCI as a sector (e.g., DCMS 2001) similarly rested on the idea of creativity as a phenomenon that can be cultivated and monetized. The issue of whether creativity has a status beyond its “imagined” (Anderson 1983) and attributed aspects is potentially relevant for practitioners because it raises the further question of whether those who aspire to creative practice and creative lives are pursuing attainable objectives.

Relatedly, there are different assumptions about creative value. CCI researchers have been challenged for failing to take account of creative value in the sense of aesthetic quality (Born 2010). One question is whether a sociological account can accommodate the distinctiveness of “good” creative work (Banks 2017) as a quality that is supposedly independent of context. Critics of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and others, on the power of design museums and art galleries argue that creative practices and outputs have a value that is “in excess of that ascribed to them either as social facts or as commodities” (Banks 2017:31). Value is also an issue for academics concerned with the self-exploitation of workers in the CCI. The question here is whether there is some special value and experience of fulfillment in the ever-expanding range of supposedly creative occupations and activities (McRobbie 2002). In addition, for creative workers and practitioners themselves, value is relevant to external recognition and also their personal judgments of their practice, for instance, in decisions about the point at which a creative output is finished and whether the creative work has been successful.

A further issue raised by the different academic conceptualizations concerns the relation, if any, between creative and monetary value. Although accounts of the CCI, especially by policymakers, have emphasized the economic value of the creative, there is also a well-established idea that monetary value and creative value are not connected. An extreme version is the assumption that poverty is an inevitable and even essential aspect of the artistic life: the artist in the garret who is unable to sell his work may later be recognized as a genius. Hesmondhalgh (2007:20) criticizes this opposition of creativity and commerce but also notes its continuing effects in the CCI, for example because it “adds to the uncertainty and difficulty of the environment in which cultural businesses work.” For practitioners, the question of value relates to motivation: is the creative practitioner working to earn, like a conventional worker, or to achieve some higher fulfilment and self-actualization?

Economic sociologists suggest that the relationship between economic and creative value is complex. Olav Velthius (2003:184) argues that in art markets, pricing operates as “a semiotic communicative system akin to language.” Prices can signal creative value and the status of the artist. They can be manipulated to protect the self-esteem of artists and collectors: “People find ways of communicating non-economic values via the economic medium of price” (Velthius 2003:207). Alison Gerber (2017:7) also discusses the economic and the artistic or creative as interlinked. The US artists she interviewed present “narratives of investment” in order to “account for the value of the things that they do,” for instance, in terms of the time, money, effort, and choices involved and other opportunities foregone. She suggests such accounting is required because “everyone expects returns on their resource commitment (Gerber 2017:33). Her analysis found that the artists vary the justification at different times for different purposes. Gerber argues that “instrumental” accounts position the speaker as a rational economic actor, seeking to maximize profit or some other economic advantage, such as employment opportunities. In contrast, “evaluative” accounts offer noneconomic justifications, such as the creative rewards of working as an artist. Gerber found in her participants’ talk an emphasis on “loving” the work similar to that noted by CCI researchers (e.g., Taylor and Littleton 2012). She also found a moral justification that art benefits society, again paralleling findings from research on the CCI (Banks 2007).

The differences and contradictions in academic conceptualizations of creativity may have implications for creative practitioners. However, it is also possible that these issues are not recognized by the practitioners themselves or regarded as irrelevant. This article therefore investigates the understanding of creativity that is taken up in creative practitioners’ own talk about themselves and their work. The next section presents the rationale for looking at this practitioner concept and outlines the research approach that is adopted to investigate it.

Researching Creativity as a Practitioner Concept

The research presented in the following sections investigates how contemporary creative practitioners understand creativity. The interest is in creativity as a participant concept. This is consistent with a discursive psychological focus on categories that “participants themselves may treat as meaningful” (Edwards 1997:60) as part of their “sense-making practices (Edwards 1997:63). It is also consistent with the ethnographic distinction between “etic” and “emic” research (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007). In these terms, creativity as the topic of academic research is an “observer-identified” theme and category: it is not assumed to be identical to creativity as the concern of contemporary creative practitioners. The latter, emic category can be studied through an examination of the “terms, images and ideas that are current in [the participants’] culture” (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007:194). In this article, the culture of interest is that of the (predominantly) Western and affluent national contexts (e.g., the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australasia) in which creativity is currently widely celebrated. The research presented in the following does not attempt to discover or specify what is creative. It investigates the meanings and associations that creativity carries for participants.

This research analyses transcribed talk from interviews. The narrative-discursive methodology (Taylor and Littleton 2006, 2012) was developed as part of the social psychology tradition of social constructionism (Gergen 1985), discourse analysis, and critical discursive psychology (Wetherell 1998). In social constructionist terms, talk provides evidence of the “human meaning systems” through which we understand the world and our experience (Gergen 1985:270). The focus is not on individuals as members of groups or subgroups but on the meanings and associations that make up the shared knowledge they draw on in their accounts and sensemaking. This “discursive backcloth” (Wetherell 2001) comprises both established understandings and ongoing contemporary discussion. Available “discursive resources” shape participants’ talk about themselves as creative practitioners and the practice itself. There are parallels with Pierre Bourdieu’s accounts of “cultural messages” and “doxa” that constitute “a space of possible” and a “repertory of actual and virtual possibilities” (Bourdieu and Eagleton 1992:200).

The multiple discursive resources around creativity and the creative are approached as a ragged, potentially contradictory accumulation. Unlike the relatively coherent theorizing and communications of intellectual networks (e.g., Collins 2000), the research approach does not assume the logical coherence or regularity of meanings that might be implied by terms like system or order. ⁵ Available discursive resources may include more formal accounts, for instance from academia and policy, as well as the commonsense understandings that Gerber (2017:81) refers to as “contemporary imaginaries of traditional practice,” such as “the art-for-art’s sake garret dweller.” Resources carry social and cultural values and also emotional loading or affect derived from particular contexts of use. Some resources may acquire additional personal meanings for a speaker. For example, the elite status of “high arts” like painting and classical music has class associations. These can be reinforced or challenged in the emotional experience of a particular member of society, impacting positively or negatively on the associations that art carries for that person (Taylor 2015a).

The research approach assumes that an “active speaker” (Wetherell 1998) draws on the available resources to do discursive work. (This is similar to Gerber’s 2017 discussion of her participants’ active use of “narrative” resources.) As part of this discursive work, a speaker may confront and negotiate contradictions or avoid them. Other discursive work may include the “identity work: to construct and present an emergent self-in-the-making (Taylor 2015a) and “rhetorical work” against potential challenges (Billig 1987). For instance, in the terms of this approach, resources taken up by the women artists discussed by Bain (2004) included the established and gendered images of both the artist in the studio and the carer in the family home. The resources conflicted around the prioritizing of, respectively, the work and the claims of family members. The conflict “troubled” the artist’s position in relation to the studio space and potentially her practice and identity as an artist (see also Taylor 2011; Taylor and Paludan 2019). These examples illustrate the critical approach adopted in the research. The interest is ultimately in issues of power and inequality, including categorizations of people and practices that perpetuate privilege and exclusion.

Claiming a Creative Identity

The participants construct and claim a creative identity in two patterns that correspond to repertoires noted in other research (Taylor and Littleton 2006, 2012). First, the participants refer to their childhood experience of creative activities, presenting an early interest, and sometimes the creativity of other members of their family to support their claim to a creative identification.

EXTRACT 1 (P1) I was always really creative and I liked making things My Mum was always on the sewing machine making some soft toys because she was working in a nursery and she was always making soft toys for the children My father was really creative too

A second pattern is that the practitioner claims an early awareness of being different because of their artistic interest or for other reasons.

EXTRACT 2 (P2) I seem to be the sort of black sheep in the family that has the sort of artistic bent

These retrospective accounts construct the speaker as exhibiting creativity and a (different) identity from an early age, implying continuity from the past to present as evidence of a creative identity. Such continuity is consistent with a conceptualization in which “life follows the pattern of a story and unfolds from an origin, understood both as a point of departure and also as a first cause or, better, a generative principle, up till a final point which is also a goal” (Bourdieu 1996:187). Bourdieu criticizes the conceptualization for exaggerating the coherence and unity of a life, as would critical discursive psychologists. However, this way of understanding creativity, as the “generative principle” that defines and drives a biography, is well established. It is an available resource for speakers’ accounts of themselves as artists and creative practitioners. Constructing such a unity in their lives functions to warrant or justify their claim to be creative and their pursuit of their practice.

For some participants who had attended art college but later put aside their practice, to teach or raise children, such a unity also confers a “rightness” on their return to the practice, as a reclaiming of their original creative self. The unity can be invoked in brief references.

EXTRACT 3 (P3) Yeh I mean the kids are grown up now they’ve left home so my time is my time now

EXTRACT 4 (P4) now that I’ve retired I’m using my understanding of the medium to explore the things which I never had time to do before

Continuity is also constructed in time references, like “always” (as in Extract 1). These emphasize the maker’s long-term commitment to their practice, reasserting the identity and the vocation, creative capacity, or “artistic bent,” as one of the participants refers to it.

EXTRACT 5 (P2) one thing about being an artist is I will always try different mediums different techniques in things because I want to stretch myself I don’t want to stagnate

EXTRACT 6 (P5) Yes I’m always looking for new techniques and different styles different ways of working

A Creative Practice

The participants were invited to describe their practice. The details of course varied because of the practitioners’ different specialisms, but there was a strong pattern across the interviews that can be labeled a repertoire of innovation and experimentation. Referring positively to innovation, participants describe their attempts to achieve it, for instance, by modifying materials. For example, a milliner explained how she cuts and dyes feathers. Novelty is also achieved by seeking out new, different materials and equipment. Two ceramicists (in separate interviews) describe their use of glazes and other techniques.

EXTRACT 7 (P6) I’ve been experimenting recently with different type of glazes and then planning to make my own glazes too The products I have now mainly with commercial glazes I’ve been using them by mixing them to give a unique colour too like this one you can see here

EXTRACT 8 (P7) I use like a hessian material that I roll the clay into or I use lace sometimes you know anything really that will Little combs as well like this one here actually yeah combs like that to create texture and a different finish on it A real range I’m always experimenting with different glazes you see all these ones here that I’ve got I one thing I haven’t started to do yet is mix my own I tend to use ready made ones

Practitioners who source ready-made materials from a commercial supplier can construct innovation in accounts of how they engage with the potential uses.

EXTRACT 9 (P5) They tend to bring out a new glass every now and then. . . So I’d go onto the [online site] . . . they’ve got a training section so I would look at what they recommend you can do with the glass and the firing temperatures and then look at what I can do with it and play with it

Participants also refer to innovation and experimentation with techniques. This is often presented as effortful, involving many different processes or even physical exertion. Participants also emphasize how they need to overcome difficulties, for instance in references to “trial and error” (Extracts 11) and “challenge” (Extract 12).

EXTRACT 10 (P8) (batik textile artist): most of the time I will paint the colours on and build up the design that way Over the last year or so I’ve been experimenting with bleach as well so when I’ve got a colour in I’ll bleach some of it out and then wax over the top and really layer up the designs and make them a lot more detailed than I used to

EXTRACT 11 (P9) (metalworker): oh believe me it’s a lot of trial and error Erm I see something like repousse which is where you actually beat some you beat an image out of copper I didn’t know really much about it and I did I read a little book on it This was way before YouTube and I thought I’d give it a try So I made myself a sandbag and I started hitting and shaping it and I didn’t realize that I’d developed my own technique which is not exactly unique but very different from how you’re supposed to do it

EXTRACT 12 (P10) (woodturner): it was really a sort of challenge to myself to start because I got fed up with doing round things I started doing square things And oblong things And that is a bit more tricky technique wise

The participants therefore construct a recognizable (or, in Jerome Bruner’s [1987] term, “canonical”) narrative of creative practice as innovative and difficult. The process is future-focused and open-ended. This can be contrasted, for example, with a possible construction of creative practice as the skilled reproduction of a classic technique.

Creative Value

The participants’ references to creative value were less direct than their accounts of creative practice or claims to a creative identity. Part of Becker’s (1982:357) myth of the artist is that the specialness of the creative maker and the work are inextricably linked: “Works and makers stand in reciprocal relation to one another.” The maker’s identity therefore guarantees the kind of creative value referred to by Born (2010) and Banks (2017). This is obvious with the work of an acknowledged “name,” as in references to “a Picasso.” The participants generally avoid such claims, perhaps out of modesty, constructing the value of their work less directly.

There is a pattern of references to the uniqueness that derives from the elaborate and experimental making practices already outlined; participants talked of the desirability of an object being different to a mass-produced commercial product.

EXTRACT 13 (P12): I like things to be individual bespoke I don’t want to do mass production that look all the same

Another supposed source of value is from personal connections. This is indicated in a practitioner’s account of someone else’s work. The (other) practitioner had modified a piece of building material from a historic building near her home, collected nearly half a century before when she first came to live in the city.

EXTRACT 14 (P14): somebody an artist from here she’s got a bit of slate from [area of the city] from when she first moved there in the 1970s when there was still a barn at [area of the city] And she’d saved it It happened to be about the size of A5 so she painted a bit of the map of [the city] on it So for personal history for her it was brilliant And people just were really inspired

Here, the maker’s personal connections “inspired” people and produced the “special emotional experiences” (Becker 1982:357) associated with the myth of the artist.

A variation on this repertoire of personal value is exemplified in Extracts 15 and 16. Here, the practitioners refer to a piece of creative work that originated in a personal view or principle. This again corresponds to the “reciprocal relation” noted by Becker (1982:356). The repertoires also exemplify a pattern of a linear process, from this starting point to the final creative output, which resembles some psychological models (e.g., Botella 2018). According to some of the practitioners’ accounts, there is an almost alchemical transformation of the personal into a work of creative value. For example, in Extract 15, a textile artist describes how a work represents relationships in her life, color-coded to indicate their different meanings to her (“soul significant,”“heart significant,”“mind significant”).

EXTRACT 15 (P15) (textile artist): Now it’s a bit complicated its a bit conceptual Basically what I’ve done is I’ve written down all the significant people in my life . . . OK so red is soul soul of significance. . .Then I have my sister who is orange because she’s heart significant . . .And some of the relationships that I’ve had they start off orange because they’re heart significant and then they become soul significant for a while and then you break off and then they change to yellow and become mind significant because they’re still there in your mind but they’re not in your heart anymore they’re not as strong

Other practitioners “decoded” the finished work to explain the starting point. In Extract 16, the work is presented as having originated in a “message” that the maker wanted to convey about miners’ working lives.

EXTRACT 16 (P4) (photographer and sculptor): . . .there was a tiny little figure . . .and then I’ve added certain things to portray the idea of mining and clay work and that sort of thing which went on and the features have simply gone So the figure is now a form of cypher if you like for all people who were working under those situations

The repertoire of the personal corresponds to other aspects of the myth criticized by Becker (1982:353), “a particular, intensely individualistic theory of art and how it is made.” The emphasis is on “the maker’s special qualities and worth” as the basis of art and therefore, by extension, on personal involvement as central to creative making.

The construction of creative value through the repertoire of the personal resolves the problem of valuing the work in monetary terms. Although these practitioners did attempt to sell their work, there was a strong pattern of references, even from those who make a living from their practice, to the impossibility of charging a price that reflects the effort of making.

EXTRACT 17 (P16): they don’t appreciate the time it takes to make and you can’t just charge for it

EXTRACT 18 (P6): you spend so much time on them and also there’s a lot of effort putting into these pieces … you can’t sell them cheap . . . [but] sometimes people are not willing to pay for that

Another strong pattern corresponds to Gerber’s (2017)“instrumental” accounts and the claims in psychology and the CCI regarding the practical application or utility of the creative. Here, the term therapeutic was often used, as in Extract 19 in which the practitioner is referring to workshops she runs. Similarly, in Extract 20, the practitioner refers to her work as “healing.”

EXTRACT 19 (P17): Yes and it’s really lovely when it helps people feel better And I did a project with [organization name] a few years ago and one lady who was very ill with depression said that she couldn’t do it and she got very upset And in the end after three weeks she started to make [a piece of work] and when she’d finished it . . . the look on her face [laughs] and she was so happy about that piece and it makes it really worthwhile when you can actually share your gifts and let other people do amazing things

EXTRACT 20 (P18): I realize I have a concept behind (the works) I think And I feel the concept is kind of it’s some kind of healing

This notion of therapeutic value also appears as beneficial for the practitioners themselves. One explained why he had taken up his practice alongside another occupation.

EXTRACT 21 (P6): there was always something missing in my life I think you know because I think I like what I’m doing working in [occupation] and it’s convenient as well and you do get a decent salary and you get a good standard of living and other things But there was always something missing

Some accounts link the therapeutic function to the practice providing an escape.

EXTRACT 22 (P20) (stained glass artist): What I find is that when I’m making stained glass it doesn’t matter what’s happening in my life at that particular time Everything is just completely cut off because I’m so absorbed in what I’m doing that you know you have no worries everything just kind of disappears into the wind really so it’s very very therapeutic