Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged

by Hannah Wohl

What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is profoundly influenced by social interactions even when artists work alone. Sociologist Hannah Wohl draws on more than one hundred interviews and two years of ethnographic research in the New York contemporary art market to develop a rich sociological perspective of creativity. From inside the studio, we see how artists experiment with new ideas and decide which works to abandon, destroy, put into storage, or exhibit. Wohl then transports readers into the art world, where we discover how artists’ understandings of their work are shaped through interactions in studio visits, galleries, international art fairs, and collectors’ homes.

Bound by Creativity reveals how artists develop conceptions of their distinctive creative visions through experimentation and social interactions. Ultimately, we come to appreciate how judgment is integral to the creative process, both resulting in the creation of original works while also limiting an artist’s ability to break new ground. Exploring creativity through the lens of judgment sheds new light on the production of cultural objects, markets, and prestige.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

229 pages, Paperback

Published June 23, 2021

Reviews

[Em Mata · Rating 4 out of 5]

“By examining aesthetic judgement as relationally influenced, temporally linked, and emotionally felt, we can analyze the creative process itself as a sequence of judgements directed toward objects that is oriented by social values.”

[David Sogge · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book lays out results of recent ethnographic fieldwork among tribes of artists, brokers, gallery owners, critics and wealthy collectors of created objects in the “money-drenched art world” of New York City. Keeping lofty theorization at bay, it probes what is at play in that world, its social mores, self-ascriptions and struggles for salience and status. The book's more convincing bits come in anecdotes, direct observations and citations, paraphrased or otherwise. Less interesting are generalised, even equivocal remarks about ‘aesthetic autonomy’ and ‘creative visions’. Nevertheless this kind of social science does a good job of disabusing us of magical thinking, namely a belief that the rise and fall of fashions, careers and prices in contemporary art just happen; on the contrary, such things are brought about by influential figures among the art world's tribespeople and their hierarchies.

[madison bradford · Rating 4 out of 5]

art speak/art sociology

[Stefan Timmermans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book giving us a close-up view of the contemporary art world answering the age-old question of how do we know that art is good?