Seriously, what do we gain from having this term in the English language? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for new coinages and for enriching the language by adding new words or new uses for all words (‘clusterfuck’, now that was a word we all definitely needed) but only if the do enrich, clarify or otherwise add to things.
So ‘creatives’ means what exactly?
According to the Cambridge Dictionary a creative is “a person whose job involves producing original ideas or doing artistic work”. At the other end of the age scale, the Urban Dictionary is going for “A person with a never-ending, intense desire to produce based on originality of thought, expression, etc. that impacts nearly every aspect of their life, both in negative and positive ways.” which at least doesn’t limit it to people’s employment, which is a good thing because lots of people are seriously creative in their spare time. To go back to the Cambridge definition, ‘producing original ideas’ can cover everything: you could spend your time coming up with original ideas of how to pump out a sewage farm or grow carrots, and both of those are vital things, but no wheatgrass sipping hipster in some former warehouse is going to include you as one of their friends who are ‘creatives’. One might be impressed with the ‘never-ending desire to produce’ in the Urban Dictionary till we remember somebody like the amazingly creative Francis Bacon who was mainly possessed of a never ending desire to get rat-arsed in the Groucho Club rather than producing painting. Though to be honest I’m not sure he’s be welcome among the organic quinoa tea and fringe beard set either.
Let’s look at alternative, equally good and frankly in my opinion superior things which could replace ‘creatives’
- Person who does creative things
- Person who produces things in the field of art, photography design or music
- Or for that matter we could just say ‘artist’ ‘designer’ ‘photographer’ ‘musician’ etc
The first two clearly have a major difference from the single word term: yes you’ve worked it out, they’re longer, but the first one is really only four times as long and they’re not difficult words are they? Are people just sacrificing clarity for brevity, or possibly laziness? I doubt it given the ability of the Youtube generation to generally use a thousand words where one will do; you doubt that’s the case? Just remember the number of times you’ve waded through a 20 minute video to realise it could have been half the length and still packed the same content.
Think back in the good old days, say the 60s. Can you imagine the aforementioned Francis Bacon calling himself ‘a creative’? Or Bailey? Or Jim Morrison? Back in the day you were an artist, a photographer or a musician. You didn’t need some umbrella term for yourself which added nothing to your life.
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