ABOUT EUSSSI Associate Professor of Sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara
The Social Life of Solitary Creation: Reworking Symbolic Interactionism in the Studio
Howard Becker famously argued that creativity is not the work of a solitary genius but a collective process. Unsurprisingly, symbolic interactionists studying creativity have largely followed his approach, focusing on cooperation and collaboration in face-to-face interactions. Offering both a challenge to and an extension of this tradition, I ask: How can we use symbolic interactionism to theorize creativity in solitude? I explore this question through the case of contemporary visual art—a field in which artists, while deeply influenced by the social world, often work alone. Using symbolic interactionism in conjunction with theories of materiality and judgment, I analyze more than one hundred interviews and two years of ethnographic research in the New York contemporary art world. From inside the studio, I show how artists experiment with new ideas and decide which works to abandon, destroy, put into storage, or exhibit. As I reveal, artists do not think of creative results as objectively good or bad. Instead, they pursue ideas that they view as relevant to their creative visions—bundles of core and enduring elements within their oeuvres. Their perceptions of creative visions arise through the process of experimentation itself and are continually reshaped as artists produce new works and ascertain how their works are interpreted by others. Building from these empirical observations, I theorize the creative process as a sequence of judgments, oriented by social values that emerge through interactions within a field and directed toward evolving objects. This framework offers a way to understand how solitary creative work remains fundamentally social.