Against Creativity

by Oli Mould

Everything you have been told about creativity is wrong.From line managers, corporate CEOs, urban designers, teachers, politicians, mayors, advertisers and even our friends and family, the message is 'be creative'. Creativity is heralded as the driving force of our contemporary society; celebrated as agile, progressive and liberating. It is the spring of the knowledge economy and shapes the cities we inhabit. It even defines our politics. What could possibly be wrong with this?In this brilliant, counter intuitive blast Oli Mould demands that we rethink the story we are being sold. Behind the novelty, he shows that creativity is a barely hidden form of neoliberal appropriation. It is a regime that prioritizes individual success over collective flourishing. It refuses to recognise anything - job, place, person - that is not profitable. And it impacts on everything around the places where we work, the way we are managed, how we spend our leisure time. Is there an alternative? Mould offers a radical redefinition of creativity, one embedded in the idea of collective flourishing, outside the tyranny of profit. Bold, passionate and refreshing, Against Creativity, is a timely correction to the doctrine of our times.

Genres: Nonfiction, Design, Philosophy, Politics, Art, Economics, Sociology

256 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 25, 2018

About the author

Oli Mould is Lecturer in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. His work focuses on issues of urban activism, social theory and creative resistance. He is the author of Urban Subversion and the Creative City and blogs at tacity.co.uk.

aka Oliver Mould

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to read this book, well, not literally, but once I had read the title, it became urgent. In part, this was out of a kind of perverse sense of pleasure. There are lots of books that essentially do this - they take a topic that everyone just assumes is unequivocally good - you know, motherhood, apply pie, giving a list of three examples - and then tells you all the things that are bad about that generally assumed good thing. The best part of this is that as a reader I then come to these books with my bullshit detector particularly primed. But this book matched my prejudices - and so I came away feeling quite challenged by some of the ideas presented here - which was what I was hoping, I guess, but not totally expecting. Even though I often think that I absolutely believe there is nothing in the world that is totally good or totally bad - creativity would have been one of those things that would have slipped over the line into the mostly, if not entirely great side of the ledger. This book provided something of a curative.

The problem is that we live in a society that defines creativity as anything that sustains and justifies the current state of the world. So, creativity is something that finance managers do when they create derivatives that almost crash the world’s financial system. Creativity is something Uber drivers are meant to do so as to turn a living wage out of an employment model that is long on exploitation and short on anything else (security, sick leave, salary, support).

The bit of this I particularly liked was the section on ‘art-washing’ - the idea being that whenever you want to gentrify an area the first thing you need to do is to make it arty - you get artists in to do arty type things and that, in turn, draws the ‘creatives’ in like moths. It is, of course, best to do this in spaces that weren’t ‘places’ before you started. You know, places were only poor people lived or where other industries have moved out. You might even reference the old uses of the place in your marketing - marketing being the definition of the peak of ‘creativity’ - the example given here was a wall in a restaurant with bullet holes left in it - a kind of ‘this used to be a very dangerous space - what milk do you like in your latte?’

The impression you are left with is the endless sameness of ‘creativity’ and of ‘creative spaces’. The mind numbing blandness of it all.

Another aspect of this is that the major thrust of creativity in the world today is technology. But because every aspect of implementing technology into our lives is essentially to turn a buck, often technology does little more than smash us further and further into atoms - isolated and even afraid of the other people around us who are also seeking to turn a buck. Relationships have turned into exchanges - and only valuable for the value created for us in the exchange. This is interesting since it really doesn’t have to be that way - a lot of the technology we are creating could do a lot to strengthen our democracy, community and thereby improve our lives. But it almost invariably does the opposite and if it doesn’t, its ‘good use’ is probably an after-thought. The example given here is the ‘sharing economy’ - which has created a whole new meaning for the verb ‘to share’. Rather than just giving away the stuff you don’t need anymore - perhaps to a local charity, say - you are encouraged to think about how you might turn it back into cash on eBay or some other turn-my-stuff-into-dough site. This monetary conversion of every aspect of life risks turning us into the worst of misers. But then, being a miser, and selfish, and greedy are the highest moral callings of our society. As Thatcher said, there is no alternative and society doesn’t exist.

He ends the book by saying that true creativity is disruptive - that it undermines what already exists - and so, the creativity we are witnessing today - that reinforces the already existing - isn’t really a form of creativity likely to last. He provides half a dozen ways to be creative at the end - but I found this the least satisfying part of the book. I preferred an example given earlier in the book where a group of people opposed to gentrification protested against a local real estate agency called ‘Foxtons’ and they did so by - this being in Britain - organising a Foxtons Hunt. That is, they would organise someone to contact the real estate agent to take them out to one of their properties, and on the drive out the person in the car would put on a fox outfit and then all of these people dressed as fox hunters would suddenly appear and the hunt would be on. When asked what they hoped they would achieve from this - they didn’t have a grand plan or a single hoped for outcome - certainly destined to fail. Lots of people would likely see this as a bit of a waste of time, then - but I think it isn’t. I think having the problem pointed out to you is an important first step - and ridicule is a grossly under-rated weapon. Clearly ridicule on its own is not enough - which I guess is why God invented the Guillotine - but then, you have to start somewhere.

[Rob M · Rating 2 out of 5]

Against Creativity has a fine idea at its core - one that would have made an excellent long format essay or article - but sadly not a particularly good book. Even a relatively short book like this one.

The idea is thus; creativity is the act of making something new, but under the conditions of capitalism, creativity is co-opted to simply reproduce more of what the market wants and expand the sphere of the already existing power structures. Instead of creating new ways of being and seeing, it creates more of the same.

For those of us of a certain generation, immersed in the atmosphere of the "creative" business model and "creative" career in a "creative" neighbourhood, this is an attractive thesis which appeals to our increasingly disappointing experience of the world.

So far so good. Like many activistic books of this type, it presents an excellent and well reasoned critique of the existing situation. Unlike George Orwell's boot-stamping-on-a-face-forever metaphor, capitalism's process of social control is insidious and almost invisible. Books like this serve a genuinely useful function in helping us step back from our reality and thinking critically about how that reality been designed, who by and who for. In this case, Oli Mould does an admirable job of demonstrating the roots of the corporate takeover of creativity in Silicon Valley ideology and Blair-Clinton era economic regeneration policies.

Mould also presents an intriguing case for disabled people's subjective experiences of the world providing a different version of creativity, often leading to better outcomes in defiance of a market aimed at the "average" person. His example of a blind architect creating urban space which ultimately ends up better for sighted and blind people alike is a particularly neat example.

However, after this it all falls down a bit. Warning signs begin to emerge. The use of the phrase "x bodies" or the invocation of "x spaces" arouse suspicions that we might be dealing with a postgraduate in their early 30s who had high hopes for Occupy but ended up disappointed in a low level academic position. Right on cue we get a lengthy section on exploitative practices within academic institutions.

From about half way through, the book just sort of trails off into a passionate but uninteresting defence of anti-capitalist activism as something more edifying than monetising your fine arts degree for a marketing company. This book identifies a big, systematic cancer within the capitalist order, and concludes with an ad-hoc list of hobby horse solutions. The final intellectual nail in the coffin is its deference to the discredited postmodern obsession with "transforming the language" we use to describe the world, in the vague hope that will begin to transform the oppressive structures within it. I'm sure Mould's heroic insistence on describing disabled people as "diffabled" (differently abled, get it?) throughout is laudable enough though.

Ultimately, I share Oli Mould's frustration. Creativity has been relegated from mankind's highest calling to a tool for selling capitalism to an emerging social strata of middle class graduates. However, I don't share his view that playing pass-the-conch-shell in community centres is how its going to be saved.

You'd save yourself a lot of time by just reading Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism instead.

[Cathie Thurgate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Against Creativity argues that 'creativity' has been subsumed into Capitalism, and is now merely used as a tool to further the same neo-liberal status quo. Each chapter covers a different facet of life - politics, architecture, technology - showing how the term creativity has lost any revolutionary power or any power to create something actually different, and instead we are pressurised to bring creativity into every detail of our lives - to be 'creative' with our time to get more done at work while having our hours cut, to bring 'creativity' to jobs that are unsatisfying, that we only need to be 'creative' to succeed and to raise ourselves out of hardship.
This book definitely challenged me and the way I thought about my own creativity and arts practice. I could feel myself starting off slightly resistant - specially to things like 'art-washing', where Oli Mould argues that art and artists are used to preclude or glossover gentrification, but that's the point of reading books like these - to challenge and inform yourself, and for myself as an artist, to try and make sure I use art in a way which makes things better, not worse.
I wish there had been longer spent on the people who are challenging things; it felt like each chapter spent a long time pointing out a problem, with only a few paragraphs at the end of each to describe the people who had found ways to solve that problem. I would have loved to have had longer descriptions or casestudies of that different revolutionary creativity.

[Supriyo Chaudhuri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a powerfully argued tract against commercialised creativity, which de-socialises the creative process and privileges consumption above everything else. There are good parts of the book - the section on technology is among them - and not so good parts, which reads more like an academic paper. And, as with other books like this, the attempts to outline a solution, of building creative resistance, appears optimistic and strained, compared to the eloquent description of the pervasiveness of the challenge. But, overall, reading it was worth the labour.

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author has a compelling central argument that tethers the book together; that modern "creativity" has been largely co-opted as a tool for capital. And while his thesis may be largely apt and fascinating, there are times throughout the book where his examples and concepts could have been more concretely based on lived experiences and research. For example, the author makes large and sweeping statements about the anti-capitalist potential of 3D printing. Yet the fundamental economics of the practice point to a very different likelihood for the masses that doesn't necessarily come from capitalism itself, but the limits of the technology. The end effect are paragraphs and paragraphs of theoretical visions of culture that don't quite purport to reality and remain constrained in theory. Granted, there are some biting critiques and stories that so eloquently embody the core idea of the book (the hipster cafe with bullet holes is especially poetic). But as is the case with so much critique of the amorphous ungraspable concept of capitalism, a lot of fingers end up pointing towards the void.

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really good book that illustrates the way capitalism has commodified the idea of creativity and this can be see essentially every job posting these days. He goes through the way capitalist creativity and the creative class has effects on advertising, politics, work, technology, and, most interesting to me, housing and the city. It's a fairly quick read but worth it.

[August Lim · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book's basic premise is that "Contemporary capitalism has commandeered creativity to ensure its own growth and maintain the centralisation and monetisation of what it generates." Each chapter looks at how capitalist creativity manifests itself in different places—politics, work, the city, etc. Mould does a good job showing how creativity masks austerity, gentrification, competition, and other deleterious effects of neoliberalism. (I wished, though, that he'd spent more time on specific case studies, as it often felt like he was jumping from one country or movement to another without giving either enough attention or acknowledging important differences between them.) I found his introduction and sustained attention to Richard Florida's idea of the "creative class" especially helpful. Composed of enterprising individuals who innovate and disrupt and consequently achieve capitalist progress, the members of the creative class are ideal neoliberal subjects, and Mould compellingly shows how individuals and entities ranging from real estate agents to local governments have championed this class.

The book was a quick and enjoyable read, but it had its flaws—mainly instances in which he needed to elaborate and analyze more thoroughly. One example was Mould's discussion of disability—or, as he calls it, "diffability." While he does frame the section by introducing the medical and social models of disability, he doesn't really engage with work from disability studies, not even to explain why he uses "diffability." He outlines how capitalism produces disability and how disability can reveal alternative, more just ways of organizing society, but the section felt underdeveloped. Bafflingly, it didn't feature any examples of disability activists organizing against capitalism. I point out this example because it shows the book's tendency to extrapolate from different cases without giving the cases themselves careful enough attention. This didn't ruin the book for me, but it left me wanting more.

[Scott Folsom · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the response to Florida et.al. that I needed in 2014 when I was taking an educational technology course and had to read him. There's one quibble I have, and it's with his discursive intervention into disability studies with the figure of the "diffabled". I'm of two minds about it, both of them disapproving. First, the broader disability studies community tends to have taken the political decision that disability exists as a political class and that the label itself is value neutral, and that attempts to flatten (dis)ability into a form of "differently abledness." I could forgive this if he were doing something novel with the neologism, but he's grafting the social model of disability onto a new term, using the argument that "it's capitalism that disables us" to argue that a new term is needed to speak about disabled subjects when working both within and without capitalism. Acknowledging the social model already comes with this implicit understanding, without having to conjure new terms. (I might also argue that to coin this specific term, which is a portmanteau of "differently abled", it makes me wonder the level of care paid to considering disability studies prior to intervening.)

That concern aside, the text is a worthwhile intervention in both the neoliberal discourse of creativity espoused by Florida and others and the ongoing capture of the commons by capital under neoliberalism.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oli Mould's main thesis is that creativity as we know it today under Capitalism, is so unlike the creativity we think we know. He explores the spaces of work, people, politics, technology, and the city to excavate examples, and to suggest a radical kind of creativity that destabilizes what Capitalism tries to build through its version. Along the way, Mould helps define what neoliberal ideology is, and how it uses creativity to marginalize, gentrify, speed up work, keep political control from the masses, etc.

The politics in this book aren't entirely Marxist, and aren't entirely anarchist; the search for solutions to this problem are tentative and what I'd imagine Noam Chomsky might hazard if he was known for speculating on creative solutions (he isn't LOL.) I am finding that though my main political calling is Marxist, books like this help me to appreciate the way other sectors of the left imagine the impossible, as Mould puts it.

His ending chapter is all about imagining the impossible, and how it's important to create space for just that.

[Joel Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

// excellent critique of neoliberal discourse on contemporary “creativity”

[Malcolm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhere along the line, creativity became safe, became mundane, became ordinary. Its ubiquity is at odds with the equally dangerous myths of creative genius – of the individual ‘superman’ (and those lionised are almost always men) with great insight and the drive to impose their will on their culture, their environment, their people. It’s a requirement in job descriptions from entry level to executive/leadership; it’s a fundamental part of business development; it’s the heart of urban regeneration; it’s the hyper-valorised drier and bastard child of the knowledge economy. Amid all of this, creativity has become boring. Where once we dreamed the impossible, and set out to make it happen – now we’re making new mobile phone cases…..

That is to say, Oli Mould’s jeremiad-plus (it’s not just a complaint, there’s an invigorating revisioning) against creativity is aimed at a narrow vision that sees it as a set of tools to make capitalism more productive and more profitable. He, instead, proposes a vision of creativity that looks to break free of the notion that a thing has value only if is profitable, that is grounded in collectivities not individualisation, that looks for and builds systems apart from existing regimes of power, and that is oriented to democracy, the public and the commons.

It’s an invigorating image that Mould takes us to through a discussion of the appropriation of creativity-as-disruption in work, in personhood, in politics, in technology and in cities and urban development. These five chapters making up the bulk of the book not only explore those forms and sites of appropriation, but show ways in which they are contested, the limits of some of the contestation, and the emphasis on continuing and enhanced consumption. Yet through all of this he shows us also how fragile some of those regimes of power are while concurrently exposing their potency and resilience: it is a paradox of contemporary capitalism.

As good as it is, one of the limitations of argument is that it seems to base much of the basis of this appropriation of creativity in more recent shift such as that associated with Richard Florida’s imagining of the ‘creative class’ as the saviour of contemporary economic development. In his argument Mould is traversing a landscape similar to Pascal Gielen’s 2013 Creativity and Other Fundamentalisms although with a different focus than Geilen's emphasis on the philosophical and artistic underpinnings of the shift in the term form the later 1960s. These, then, are texts that supplement each other although very much for different audiences.

Mould has given us a well-made and urgent case to free creativity from its corporate shackles, to reassert what Gielen sees as creativity over the ideology of creativism. In that, it is a timely call to arms. It is well worth a look.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of this book is immediately provocative. Who could be against creativity? Oli Mould makes it clear quickly that his is a particular definition of creativity, the one manufactured for marketing and the one put in place by Richard Florida, defining the creative city. But it serves Mound’s purpose never to define it too specifically. Creativity in this book serves as a straw man for the new economy, sometimes for capitalism itself.

Despite this more people should read this book. Though not specifically referenced, it brings to mind Christopher Wylie, Jedediah Purdy, and David Graeber. Mould doesn’t make an argument as well as Purdy or Graeber, and isn’t a storyteller like Wylie, but his ideas and reflections are still on target.

To paraphrase : Among the most impactful is the dissonance in the creative economy that says one should be self-reliant and competitive. We know intuitively these are valuable attributes in the marketplace, just as we know people with privileges (family money, health, racial privilege) will rise to the top. Through deregulation supported by the gig economy as a replacement for lost infrastructure, economic stratification is worsened. Yet, truly creative professions (artists, writers) have barely / rarely had an institutional infrastructure, so must navigate these harsh waters.

Mould’s book also helped me examine my own biases, see how easily suckered I am by a veneer of collectivity/socialism/political action, particularly when it serves as marketing identity to bring customers. He highlights a London example of a pub in an area of high unemployment called Job Centre, cleverly taking the name from the former use of the space. The fact that the neighborhood only has one remaining actual job centre makes the name kind of insulting. Mould also highlights how artwashing has become a strategy in gentrification, which I think could be a whole other book.

I wish the book had more (connections, stories) as I wish he didn’t use Creativity to mean something else. But it’s worth the time, nonetheless.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very accurate critique of creativity as a tool of capitalism and an unlikely missing point in the neoliberal agenda. Oli Mould sheds light on all the modern day phenomena that you couldn't help but feel weird about, but couldn't quite pinpoint the connection between. Gentrification, artwashing, co-working spaces, Silicon valley style startups as well as Richard Florida's creative class all get well-deserved attention here. A really good read that once again proves that we have nothing to lose but our chains :)

[Reed Thomson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I, too, believe that love island led us into fascism

[Ditchface · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars

[Malcolm Duncan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended by KT. I’ve been ruminating on this a lot lately (scrambled thoughts) so it was nice to read something well structured that validated how I felt. Essentially, the premise is that creativity’s been co-opted by capitalism. The author breaks down a few case studies from around the world to support his argument. Generally I agree with the premise. I think the current state of ‘creativity’ forces people to create things that uphold a system that ultimately exploits them. Under this system, creating without the need to create value is a foolish endeavour. My takeaway is that we need more fools (people who try to achieve the impossible) in order for things to change.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each chapter of this slim book focuses on an area of capitalism that co-opts creativity to self-perpetuate (technology and city design were the most provocative).

[Katrina Sark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Introduction: What is Creativity?

p.3 – Today, the system that causes homelessness – and the other related injustices: precariousness, racism and the emboldening of fascism, massive inequality, global health epidemics and the rest – is the very same system that tells us we must be 'creative' to progress. This is because capitalism of the twenty-first century, turbocharged by neoliberalism, has redefined creativity to feed its own growth. Being creative in today's society has only one meaning: to carry on producing the status quo. The continual growth of capitalism has become the prevailing order of life.

It has not always been this way. Creativity has been, and still is, a force for change in the world. It is a collective energy that has the potential to tackle capitalism's injustices rather than augment them. Creativity can be used to produce more social justice in the world, but it must be rescued from its current incarceration as purely an engine for economic growth. This book will expose how creativity is wielded for profit. It will outline the ways in which people and institutions are being told to be creative in order to proliferate more of the same. But it will also highlight the people and processes that are against this kind of creativity, in that they forge entirely new ways of societal organisation. They are mobilizing it in a different way. They are enacting a creativity that experiments with new ways of living, ways that conjure entirely new experiences that simply would not exist under capitalism.

p.7 – Adorno and Horkheimer, in their now seminal text The Culture Industry, argued that capitalism had enabled this mass-production of culture. It had entrenched a divide between a popular culture that numbed the masses into passivity, and a high culture that heightened the senses. This separation of cultural consumption into popular and high art characterized much of the twentieth century's articulation of creativity: artists produced art worthy of the name, the rest was industrialized forms of mass objects that had far more to do with machine-like production than it did with creative genius. Schönberg and Picasso were creative; the Hollywood studios were not.

p.12 – It is easy to see then how neoliberalism and the creativity rhetoric go hand-in-glove. Being creative today means seeing the world around you as a resource to fuel your inner entrepreneur. Creativity is a distinctly neoliberal trait because it feeds the notion that the world and everything in it can be monetized. The language of creativity has been subsumed by capitalism.

p.16 – Creativity should be about seeking out those activities, people, things and ephemera that resist co-option, appropriation and stabilization by capitalism. More than that, it should be about amplifying them. It is this version of creativity that this book looks to champion.

1 – Work: Relentless Creativity

p.19 – We Are All Creative, Right? – To shed light on creative work, how it came to be conceptualized and mobilized, and how it is destroying socialized forms of labour and creative production, we need only look at the work of one man. The bestselling book The Rise of the Creative Class, written by the urbanist Richard Florida, was published in 2002 and radically changed the notion of creativity in business and political realms. Florida's argument was simple: everyone is creative. The new economic order, he argued, is fuelled by this creativity, but only a few people are able to use it for economic gain. So for a place of business to succeed, it needs to attract those who are able to make money from that creativity: those he called the ‘creative class'. These were the talented and innovative individuals who were going to change the world for the better, one pay cheque at a time. They were people who defied the stuffy, overly-bureaucratic nature of 'normal work life and preferred flexible working hours and dressing down for the office; perhaps they even spent a day or two a week working in a coffee shop. They craved autonomy and a less stifling management structure, and didn't always require financial incentives.

p.46 – True Creative Work – Creativity could be – indeed, should be – thought of more as an emancipatory force of societal change.
For real creative work to be championed, we can look to models of co-operative working arrangements that utilize communal labour and assets free from the spectre of privatization.

p.47 – For example the recuperadas movement in Argentina after the 2001 financial crisis serves as a good illustration of how a large-scale movement of exploited labourers can 'reclaim' a bankrupt and foreclosed factory, fire the bosses, and reorganize the institution from the bottom up. Far from turning to a trade union to fight their battle for them, they organized themselves without hierarchy or direction from 'above'. All the workers were paid the same wage, and management decisions were taken democratically. It was not an occupation of factories to demand that they be reopened: it was far more radical than that - it was the occupation and recuperation of its productive processes. This echoed many attempts at workers' action groups that militantly recaptured the means of production from the factory owners.

In this sense, a politics of collective action involves conscious and combined efforts to build a new economic reality, one that is more equitable, less exploitative and more communal. Co-operatives such as those in Argentina can be found all over the world, and we see them in neighbourhoods, communes and even in the commercial sector. For example, there is Coffee Cranks Cooperative in Manchester UK that both owns and controls the workspace, with their website stating they are 'establishing an economic alternative to the biased economic system we find ourselves in' There is a thrift shop in Glasgow and a bike repair shop in Oxford among many other businesses in which all workers have ownership of the store, pay is more equitable, and the workers are engaged in community-focused activities.

3 – Politics: Austere Creativity

p.110 – But creativity is never, and nor should it be, apolitical. To argue that economic development and standards of living for society are not driven by a political, or indeed ideological, agenda is to miss the point entirely. Capitalism's creative mechanisms of appropriation drive economic development, and any party's political interventionist programme will serve only to continue this because it is now the only way for it to be so.

5 – The City: Concrete Creativity

p.159 – The 'new' creative city needs to have a veneer of 'edginess', appeal to hipsters and maintain a radical, progressive and perhaps even anti-capitalist aesthetic, all the while mobilizing these (now stabilized) aesthetics for the same traditional purpose: wealth generation for the elite.
Street art is now an essential ingredient in fabricating an 'edgy' creative urban neighbour-hood, precisely because it can mobilize these traditionally 'resistive' and anti-capitalist themes in the service of profitability.

p.160 – The use of a non-politicized, contemporary art ‘scene’, coupled with a cosmopolitan night-time economy, completely glosses over social strata that characterize urban neighbourhoods. Moreover, this process glosses over the injustices that come to fore with this type of development: namely the suppression and/or fetishization of marginal and minority groups (race, gender, class and diffability) for profitable gain.

p.162 – However, the study also recognizes that much of this artistic work is co-opted to 'groom' neighbourhoods and attract investment. In essence, Toronto's neighbourhoods used the work of feminist community-based art as a means of branding that place as artistically unique and socially engaged, in the hope of attracting inward investment. This is what has been called 'artwashing’, and it is here we find another contemporary 'tactic' of creative city development.

p.168 – This is why the term ‘artwashing’ is now being used within the context of gentrification: any artistic intervention commissioned, paid for, and instigated by developers is viewed as a cynical attempt to make an area amenable to the tastes of the creative class. This artwashing process comes in many guises, from commercial street art commissioned by real estate companies, to a more complex and longer-term attempt to embed artists in council housing blocks to make it a 'trendy place to be.

[Snorki · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read with a central view that creativity is being harnessed by capitalism, something that generally agree with. There are some good examples in the book to help illustrate the points made, and much of it is thought-provoking, but I found the conclusion section a bit disappointing in that it was presented as ‘six impossible things to believe before breakfast’ (after a line from Alice in Wonderland), which to be honest, did seem quite impossible in some cases, so not very encouraging or inspiring. Some interesting ideas, a central thesis that I agree with but I was left somewhat disappointed. Probably a 3.5 star book really.

[katherine (winnie) 🏹 · Rating 4 out of 5]

doesn't get five stars to make it amazing solely because i feel like he definitely could've (and probably should've) gone into more depth about what to do next, and how to actually 'stop' this neoliberal bullshit; he kinda just glazed over that at the end and idk if he purposely discussed this on such a level as to not offend anyone or like outwardly talk about supporting marxism etc but anyway he should've lol but overall just a book of truth and an important read to start the discussion

[Ariel]

This is six months on, but I remember wishing this was a better book than it was. In theory, it dismantles the corporatized, commodified “creativity” that’s become a catchword since the 2000s. In practice, chapter after chapter this book clung to anecdotal evidence which worked as illustration but never really drove the arguments home. For me the lingering takeaway was the critique of Richard Florida’s “creative class,” but maybe that’s because I’ve read those critiques elsewhere and often.

[Melle · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book asks the right questions about the misappropriation of creativity for monetary gain. However, the argumentation fails to convince over the length of a book. An essay might have been ample enough. The repetitious examples and arguments. Did enjoy the chapter on art's role in gentrification though!

[NoRa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this. It did get boring towards the end but other than that I would recommend this book.

[Dr. Ashori]

If you are reading this book because of the title or the summary description of its content you might be disappointed. The author didn't offer a "radical redefinition" of creativity as the book claimed. It's a rather difficult book to get through and I am writing this review after reviewing my notes in the book.
I am not sure I walked away from this book learning anything new or with a new understanding of the obfuscation of creativity. There were a lot of examples and arguments provided to make support those arguments but they never really connected the dots for me.
Examples of Uber and Twitter and Facebook and all the other commonly vilified companies didn't really drive anything home for me. If the objection is with the use of their product and we believe in consumer choice and autonomy then I don't see the point. If the argument is against their business practices then the beef to be had is with the governments overseeing them.
Creativity? Not sure where this book settled on it.
There was a lot of talk about the arts infiltrating poor neighborhoods for the purposes of gentrification. I'm not sure if the author thoughts that this was a new thought and maybe that's why it seemed so out of place or perhaps the author was particularly appalled by the idea that we would use some fancy murals on a wall in order to justify gentrifying a neighborhood.
Towards the end he talked somewhat positively about a skatepark which was a closer definition to creativity, according to the author. I believe he used it as an example to say how in this case gentrification lost. However, it was just paragraphs before that he made an argument how gentrification wins when affordable housing isn't considered when changing a neighborhood.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a while to adjust to the way the author uses the word "creativity." The first quarter or so of the book is really talking about innovation, which in my mind is obviously more destructive than creative. When I hear the word "creative" I think of art and design, not algorithms and business models. It's exactly the destructiveness of this business-oriented version of "creativity" that the author is against, though, so my confusion ended up being useful. And Mould makes a good point later on that even art itself has been co-opted for profit-generating purposes — though I think he only scratched the surface of all the ways that's being done in our modern world and how much our culture suffers for it.

Still, I'm not sure what to take away from this book. There's a strongly optimistic message about collective action and socially-oriented creativity, but nothing very specific. He does hold Britain's health system up as a shining example — but didn't he also say that it had been compromised by austerity measures?

Capitalism is good at convincing people that there's no alternative to capitalism, but Mould encourages us to believe in the seemingly impossible. Capitalism is a Goliath, and I guess the whole point of the story is that David brought him down. But the big problem I perceive is that most people don't see the problem with capitalism and don't want to bring it down, and I think that's the biggest problem with this book, too: it's for people like myself who already agree with the author. It's not going to sound persuasive or even very interesting to anybody else.

[fire_on_the_mountain · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a visual artist and designer, I really vibe with where this book started, and had my horizons significantly broadened by where it went. The logic of neoliberalism consumes all, and the expectation to monetize every piece is strong-- so strong, that I originally wrote "product" in this sentence, and that's a pretty telling slip. Mould's main thesis is that it's been a political project to redefine "creativity" as an act that serves capital in an atomized, non-collaborative way the reinforces market forces and the state at large. As I drive downtown to the artwashed condo murals and same sterile glass condo projects along 14th St, I can't disagree. You know the type. If you live in any Western city, I guarantee our city centers look the same, or the plans are on the drawing board.

Artists, we should turn our creative processes another tightening crank, and really think about who or what we are serving with our work. Neoliberalism doesn't want us to forge connections with each other, or use our creativity to break out of a product stance that can be monetized, passing the benefits up the chain, for low pay or exposure just so they can divest us of our intellectual property or our very homes. Let's learn to change our expectations of ourselves, each other, and the fields we pursue our art in. If the aim was to get me fired up, it succeeded.

[Ren Morton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written as a direct rebuttal to Richard Florida’s books on the “creative class,” Mould lays out an argument for why creativity suddenly has to be part of everything we do and how that creativity isn’t actually
Creative at all, but a mechanism of capitalism to fuel more consumerism and de-aggregate resistance to neoliberal forces.

The book is dense, written much like a dissertation turned into a book. He chose very academic words, which made comprehending his arguments difficult and made much of the book obtuse, creating a barrier for mass understanding.

My big takeaway is his discussion of austerity policies and programs. Mould defines austerity as the ideology of spending less in order to decrease debt. But the way this plays out is that social services are defunded because they are too expensive, while private ventures are bailed out because they increase consumerism and profit for the elite. This is not something I had known about, but is interesting to think about in its larger context and implications.

This book is great to introduce you to concepts of austerity, gentrification, art washing, and other consumerism tactics to hyper individualize the workforce in order to prevent or break collective organizing and resistance.

It is dense, but it will also leave you wanting to learn more about these resistance efforts and burgeoning alternative political models.

[Ming Chen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was excited to read this book after reading the introduction at the Strand but I think I expected it to be more of a takedown but I ended up already agreeing with everything he said. Oil Mould argues in this book that “creativity” is wrongly idealized as the ability to create novel forms with limited means and is instead a survival tactic and product of our increasingly precarious work lives. I was most interested when he was analyzing the discourse of creativity in the context of “management literature” authors like Richard Florida lol but otherwise he focused too much on identity politics and attacking austerity policies which yes facts but also like agree with this already. Also, I think what I didn’t find totally satisfying is that Mould seems to believe that the only truly creative art practice is a collectively created one that directly critiques capitalism. He’s got a point to this but this form of art making feels ideologically driven in the same way that the commodified, gentrifying practices he critiques also feels. I think what is great about art is that it can at least try to exist outside of ideology and function which is why we need more national funding for the arts….

[Nick Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wish I had read this while I was in advertising. Would’ve loved it when I was 25 and angsty. The argument is less controversial than the title. Creativity has been privatized. Exploited by industry, subsidized by gentrification, and now expected to brainstorm their way out of consolidation-fueled budget constraints, the artist has become the unwitting workhorse of its sworn enemy the capitalist. After setting a sad scene with solid examples the book ends without offering a viable remedy. Artists don’t have a great track record for successfully organizing and the modest exceptions to that rule don’t offer much hope that evolution is conspiring to overturn it. Creative types, realizing their value, have been trading 80hr weeks not for security but for obscurity. Ideas on command are as exhausting as any manual labor. For an artist, this leaves nothing in the tank to fuel personal fulfillment. Creativity needs a sabbatical.

[Lois · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oli Mould makes some interesting and thought-provoking observations about the meaning of creativity in our capitalist society, from the cooption of the language of creativity to glamorise the stripping away of workers' rights and benefits, to the modern impossibility of thinking of any creative endeavour without also considering its potential for financial gain, to the generic creative renewal of urban spaces used to sell gentrification while displacing and discrediting the cultures of resident communities.


Mould's argument is not always quite clear, and gets lost in intellectual jargon at some moments, with the overall style confused between an academic text and popular non-fiction. However, beyond the stylistic weaknesses, Mould makes a compelling case for the reconsideration of how we understand creativity, and why it is necessary. Whether or not you agree with his argument overall, you will certainly find food for thought in these pages.