Creativity and art: three roads to surprise

摘要

The three roads to surprise are the three forms of creativity: combinational, exploratory, and transformational. In previous writings, I've illustrated these by examples drawn from many different specialist domains, and from everyday life too (Boden 2004). Here, I relate them to art (as understood in the post-mediaeval Western tradition), and especially to the visual arts. Besides many references to traditional fine art, I also discuss some less orthodox approaches- namely, conceptual art and several types of computer art. Craftworks of various kinds are also considered, in the context of a new account of the distinction between art and craft. A brief statement of my threefold theory of creativity, which underlies my recent collection of the same name (Boden 2010), is given in the chapter 'Creativity in a Nutshell'. Creativity in general is the generation of novel, surprising, and valuable ideas. "Ideas", here, is a catch-all term covering not only concepts and theories but also (for example) music and literature, and artefacts such as architecture, sculpture, and paintings. The three types of creativity, which elicit differing forms of surprise, are defined by the different kinds of psychological process that generate the new structures.