Creativity and Art

Margaret Boden presents a series of essays in which she explores the nature of creativity in a wide range of art forms. Creativity in general is the generation of novel surprising and valuable ideas (conceptual theoretical musical literary or visual). Boden identifies three forms of creativity: combinational exploratory and transformational. These elicit differing forms of surprise and are defined by the different kinds of psychological process that generate the new ideas. Boden examines creativity not only in traditional fine art but also in craftworks and some less orthodox approaches--namely conceptual art and several types of computer art. Her Introduction draws out the conceptual links between the various case-studies showing how they express a coherent view of creativity in art.