Destructive Creativity

The rationale of contemporary knowledge work is “creative destruction,” with the emphasis on “creative” and almost no serious reflection on “destruction.” The question of a future aesthetics is the question of the general legitimation of art in such an age of creative destruction. What is the function of the creative arts in a world of perpetually “innovative” information and knowledge work? The special potential of the arts in the age of knowledge work may well be to complement the humanities lesson that “cool has a history” with the crucial inverse of that lesson: history can be cool. Cool à la mode—the cool of the instantaneous present—can no longer be the exclusive obsession of knowledge workers. In the age of “creative destruction,” the sense of history will also need to be cool. This chapter looks at viral aesthetics and the potential of the new aesthetics of “destructive creativity” in the information age.

Aesthetics · Art · Creative work · Creativity · Epistemology · Function (biology) · Information Age · Legitimation · Political science · Sociology · The arts · Visual arts · Law · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology