Awards

• Winner of 2023 CSA Book Award Awarded by the Canadian Sociological Association 2023 (Canada)

Overview

The New Spirit of Creativity examines creativity as an embedded institutional value and priority within public art institutions and higher education. The book unpacks the everyday work, organization, and administration of artistic creativity and its clashes with a ""new spirit"" of creativity that has widely taken hold. Based on fieldwork conducted at three art and design universities in Canada, Saara Liinamaa tackles the fraught landscape of contemporary higher education, the uncertainties of cultural work, and ongoing concerns around austerity in Canada. This book traces how creativity is not simply practiced within the art school, but also inequitably recognized and rewarded. Liinamaa identifies the many compromises required between artistic creativity and the new spirit, while demonstrating how not all compromises are created equally; compromise can support or erode creative diversity. Drawing on a range of original sources including interviews, participant observation, policy and planning, and media this work makes a compelling case as to why art and design schools are worthy of sustained attention. By connecting shared interests across sociology, education, cultural studies, art history, and cultural theory, The New Spirit of Creativity makes a novel and agenda-setting contribution to our understanding of artistic creativity, compromise, and cultural work.

Full Product Details

9781487502805

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Reviews

The New Spirit of Creativity is a very engaging and critically sharp analysis of the status and value of art and design within higher education and beyond. Saara Liinamaa's analysis is underpinned through extensive empirical research and provides detailed insights into cultural work within Canadian art and design universities. The discussion is carefully positioned between research on cultural work and on learning and teaching within higher education. The New Spirit of Creativity is a great contribution in debating and addressing potential futures for higher education. - Daniel Ashton, Associate Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, University of Southampton Based on original empirical research, The New Spirit of Creativity richly illuminates the Canadian art school as a key site for interrogating the rhetoric of the creative economy, the ambivalence of cultural work, the dynamics of artist-academic identity formation, and the mounting pressures of contemporary academic life. Beyond closing a gap in scholarship on Canadian art schools, Saara Liinamaa brings fresh critical insight to the study of cultural labour and higher education today. - Greig de Peuter, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University Demands for creativity have become increasingly fraught, producing a new spirit of aesthetic work. In her compelling analysis of three Canadian art and design universities, Saara Liinamaa deftly demonstrates the dynamics that both encourage and hinder artists from embracing the ideal of the creative. Building on extensive in-depth interviews, she presents the tensions between compromise and critique in careers and artworks. Liinamaa's composite account of 'Imagination University' makes a powerful case for rethinking how contemporary artists must negotiate a world of institutional constraint. - Gary Alan Fine, James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University, and author of Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education

Author Information

Saara Liinamaa is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Guelph.

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