Abstract
The purpose of this theoretical article is to provide an extended definition of creativity that embraces potential cross-cultural variations in this construct. Creativity is defined as a 4-criterion construct, which includes attributes of novelty, utility, aesthetics, and authenticity. Novelty attribute stipulates that a creative work brings something new into being, which presents a new conceptual framework and/or modifies or violates an existing one. Utility attribute stipulates that a creative work is what a producer or a recipient considers creative, what represents an important landmark in spiritual, cultural, social, and/or political environment, and what addresses moral issues. The aesthetics attribute stipulates that a creative work presents the fundamental truth of nature, which is reflected in a perfect order, efficiently presents the essence of the phenomenal reality, and is satisfactorily complex, expressing both tension and intrinsic contradiction. Authenticity attribute stipulates that a creative work expresses an individual's inner self and relates one's own values and believes to the world. These attributes establish a comparison matrix, which can be used to evaluate and compare the levels of creativity of works from different areas of human endeavor.
Notes
1The term low complexity was adopted from a theory of Kolmogorov (or algorithmic) complexity (Kolmogorov, Citation1965), which refers to the length (measured in number of bits) of the shortest algorithm that can be used to compute a given computable object. Schmidhuber (Citation1997) applied this term to art to identify low-complexity art objects with shortest possible description, which potentially “capture ‘the essence’ of what is being depicted” (p. 98).