Dr. Hannah Wohl: What is Creativity? How Contemporary Artists Judge their Work

UBC Sociology’s Distinguished Speaker Series hosted Dr. Hannah Wohl for her talk titled, “What is Creativity? How Contemporary Artists Judge their Work“ on March 1, 2022. Abstract: What is creativity? Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and two years of ethnographic research in the New York contemporary art market, I develop a sociological perspective of creativity through the analytic lens of judgment. 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 empi