ABSTRACT
How and why can manageable anxiety become a destructive threat to someone’s creative abilities? While creativity can accompany mild forms of worry and sometimes alleviate stress, its advocates overstate their case in pushing it as a universal cure-all. Drawing on recent studies of working artists, this chapter points out that not everyone in the “creative class” is faring well in today’s ebullient embrace of artistry. In his canonical 1964 work The Anxious Object, art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote of the difficulties that result when definitions of art lose coherence and societies become confused about aesthetic meaning. Might today’s advocacy of the “creative industries” be doing the same thing? Writings by Brené Brown, Martin Heidegger, Søren Kierkegaard, Jacques Lacan, Joseph LeDoux, and Rollo May are explored.
