By Gerardo Sanchez, Sept. 24, 2024
The constant innovation of art forms such as music, paintings and screenplays are slowly draining the creativity out of these projects and if left unchecked will reduce all forms of art into meaningless computer-generated ideas.
“Creativity sparks innovation, and innovation sparks creativity,” said Bernardo Solano, an associate professor of theatre and new dance.
This idea has been put into question as the strides made in innovation have drained art forms of their creativity. The power of artificial intelligence and the lack of imagination in modern art forms have made the medium feel stale and repetitive. The need to stand out from a crowd of computer-generated images leads to art so far from conceivability that meaning must be injected into it like some sort of lab-grown experiment.
Yes, AI programs such as Adobe Firefly or ChatGPT can generate images or write scripts if given a prompt, leading to the creation of screenplays, paintings, essays and videos. These programs make the daunting task of imagining these ideas in the first place take mere seconds, unless the task of imagining is harder than I thought.
But there’s a certain type of satisfaction that comes from imagining something into being. Imagine a sculpture of the “Mona Lisa” or the melody to an unreleased Lana Del Rey song. The lack of imagination instead leads to an amalgamation of algorithms creating art with no thought or creativity apart from the sentence used to generate it.
The creation of a song is not just the words but the beat, the melody, the instrumentation, the length and the meaning behind it all pieced together. A two-minute song can take hours, days or even weeks to be released, only for the artist to repeat the cycle for the next song. This cycle of creation and imagination feels pointless when it’s short-lived.
But it doesn’t have to be. The innovations in art allow it to be created in seconds, but it lives just as long. Paintings that were imagined for years live for decades. Innovation allows art to be made en masse, but creativity allows one piece of art to stand alone.
“Innovation in any field is going to be the same,” said Raymond Kampf, a professor in the Department of Art. What is new and never seen before but still adheres to the basic principles of good design, that is when it is innovative.”
This isn’t to say that innovation isn’t necessary. Eventually, a creative ceiling will be met once all possible room for growth has been explored. There are only so many ways to construct a sentence before you need to include more words. But we haven’t reached that ceiling, and we’re not even close.
There are 88 unique keys in a standard piano, more than 16 million colors supported by modern browsers according to Texas Wesleyan Library and roughly 470,000 words in the English language according to Merriam-Webster. Innovation shouldn’t begin unless we have explored the present boundaries of creativity.
“Creativity comes before the innovation,” said Daniel Marcozzi, a theatre and new dance student. “I think we are privileged to have certain innovations, but ultimately it is being able to create the magic.”
But the question of which is more important between innovation or creativity can be misleading as one can’t exist without the other. The human mind can only grow for so long, feeding on the same stimuli before the desire to try something new takes over.
The concepts of innovation and creativity are intertwined with each other, and to separate them would be to deprive art of its growth and its purpose. The struggle comes from knowing when to be creative and when to innovate.
There is always a risk of losing the audience as they get older. There are previous generations who are slower to learn new practices, so “you need to accept who your audience is,” according to Marcozzi.
Innovation feels like it happens every day, and with new operating systems, new phones, virtual reality headsets and hundreds of ways to send a text message, older generations are being left behind as the never-ending race to innovate won’t stop to wait for everyone.
Innovation also leads to a market being created for any new feature, service or technology that needs to be sold to the public. But this has its own set of problems.
“The answer may end up being faith,” said Solano. “We don’t trust the people who are making all the money. We trust each other, but we do not necessarily trust the marketplace.”
While creativity sparks innovation, and innovation sparks creativity, it is imperative innovation does not overshadow creativity within art forms. Creativity without innovation will wither away as it can’t grow, but innovation left unchecked will grow too large, and it will drag creativity along with it.
A balance of these two is needed. Imagination, not innovation.
Graphic courtesy of Ruthie Johns