ABSTRACT
Worry over America’s declining innovation is bringing creativity into the public spotlight as never before. This chapter looks at how the resulting “crisis” talk (and its reality) makes creative qualities all the more desired, even as they grow more elusive and rare. In personal terms, most people feel creativity is missing in their lives—evidenced in a rising self-help industry catering to one’s “inner artist” or forgotten childhood. Amazon.com currently lists over 57,000 books devoted to creativity, representing a 30 percent increase in the past year alone. Analyzing this in her book Self-Help, Inc., sociologist Micki McGee explained the growing demand for self-improvement as a symptom of widespread worry over money and jobs. Such insecurities underlie the anxious “self” obsession infecting the U.S. today, much as Christopher Lasch described the malady decades ago in The Culture of Narcissism. Further symptoms now appear in new evidence-based programs in wellness and arts therapy from entities such as the National Endowment for the Arts. These issues are examined through the thinking of Sigmund Freud, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Hillary Davidson, Melanie Klein, Christian Smith, and Slavoj Žižek.
