The Creators

Daniel J Boorstin

These creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story--a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination. Here I have chosen creators who appeal to e, who have brought something new into the arts. But each of us alone must experience how the new adds to the old and how the old enriches the new, how Picasso enhances Leonardo and how Homer illuminates Joyce. 

I used to believe that there was no such thing as originality. I was convinced that there was nothing new beneath the sun and I read Ecclesiastes as the greatest expression of the futility of searching for something new. But I couldn't help enjoying all the many stories I read, and I did keep reading stories, old ones and new ones (speaking chronologically). Somehow, in the reading of all the many stories, I have become convinced that there really is such a thing as originality. That there can be a new story.

Boorstin's primer of the history of European (see end note) art has convinced me all the more of this truth. Although Boorstin's review of art quickly becomes a review of great artists, it none-the-less leaves you with the feeling that there is a chance that someone might make something new, that the forms of beauty and imagination, though they are all based off of the same subject matter, somehow hold the potential for genuine creation.

I was convinced that nothing new could exist because the only source we have is that which has already existed. If this was the case, I thought, it would be unreasonable to believe that something new could be managed since new would seem to entail not having existed before. It isn't new if it's old. I believed that all art was trying to reach back to truth or to reach back to depicting nature (by which I probably mean truth) in its fullest revelation. To me, that necessarily meant nothing was new.

I do still believe that art is attempting to depict truth (as opposed to reality or facts). But newness becomes real when we understand truths which we had not understood before. Truth being eternal, I don't think it can be new or old, but our understanding of truth is hardly eternal. The history of human understanding of truth is a history full of newness and originality (and also a good deal of missteps). So I do believe in originality. You have only to look at art to come to this belief. 

End Note. Boorstin subtitled this work A History of Heroes of the Imagination. A suitably grand subtitle for such a topic, it leaves me with a unpleasant taste in my mouth as I finish the work and find that it was much more accurately a history of heroes of the European imagination. Boorstin makes nods at other cultures, adds odd chapters in which he condenses the art of entire cultures (cultures which have lasted longer than the Europeans) into quick blurbs. This is frustrating. His subject is admittedly of gigantic scope and it would be impossible to discuss the entire history of art without leaving out many important figures, but in light of his consistent decision to focus on the art of Europeans, really Western Europeans, I feel that Boorstin should re-market the work as a European history of imagination.