In this lecture Andrey Velikanov discusses the nature and various aspects of creativity.
Creativity is commonly understood as any kind of activity that produces something radically new. However, our idea of it has evolved throughout history. The new was believed to be suggested to the creator by the great cosmic force. Or, creativity was the unique property of a transcendent being that created the world. Or, culture was seen as a celebration of limitless human creativity in perfecting nature. Humans dared to take the place of God and attempted to create a new world because they were unhappy with the old one. But what does it mean to be creative today, when most of our ideas repeat the ideas of the past?
‘In repeating or tracing the forms of nature, we have nurtured our consciousness with a false conception of art. The work of the primitives was taken for creation. The classics also. If you put the same glass down twenty times, that's also creation. Art, as the ability to transmit what we see onto a canvas, was considered creation. Is placing a samovar on a table also really creation? I think quite differently. The transmission of real objects onto a canvas is the art of skillful reproduction, that's all. And between the art of creating and the art of repeating there is a great difference.’ (Kazimir Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting, 1916)