Reflections on Language by Noam Chomsky (review)

Books 157 Of particular insight and interest is Rank’s description of the growth of individual artists who are conscious not only of their creative work and their artistic mission but also of their own personality and productiveness, even making for themselves the experiencesthey need for their art, as it were,turning lifeinto art. One should not be deterred by the Teutonisms and the encyclopedic illustrative material from myth, ethnology and cultural, folk and art history, in keeping with the allencompassing aspirations of theoretical works of this period. There is much of general and particular interest to repay careful reading in this complex book, not least its stimulating analysis of the predicament of artists in industrial societies as compared to their counterparts in less self-conscioussocieties throughout the world and history, and Rank’s perceptive interpretation of that elusive phenomenon, ‘the artist type’. T h eCreativeVision:A LongitudinalStudy of Problem Findingin Art. Jacob W. Getzelsand Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. John Wiley, New York and London, 1976.293 pp.. illus. $22.80, €14.30. T h e Creativity Question. Albert Rothenberg and Carl R. Hausman, eds. Duke Univ. Press, Durham, N.C., 1976. 366 pp., illus. $14.75. Reviewed by D. N. Perkins* The Creative Visionisan important book on creativity. It reports careful basicresearch on artists and the making of art that simply has not been done before. The authors describe an elaborate study of student artists and a follow-up examination of their professional involvement six years after graduation. They examine the students’ motivations, personalities, process in making art and later degree of professional success. Tables and statistical tests occur frequently, but also they discuss illustrations and individuals in a way that makes the book accessible to the non-psychologist. Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi consider a number of old questions about artists. For example, they find intelligencenot to be correlated with studio performance or later professional success. They find the stereotyped image of the artistic personality to be true: the students proved to be more reserved, amoral, introspective,imaginative,radical and self-sufficientand to tend toward attitudes usually associated with the opposite sex, in contrast with students not in the arts. Furthermore, the better artists were more extreme in these respects. The authors’ key concept isproblemjnding. They conducted a laboratory study of the students arranging and drawing a stilllife . From observerations, photographic records and follow-up interviews,the authorsassembledseveralmeasures of how much problem finding the students did. These measures included such features as: how many alternative objects did the artist consider for hisstill-life;how often did he rearrange them; how late did the basic pattern of his drawing become clear to a second party; to what extent did his comments after finishing indicate a problemfinding attitude. The authors show problem finding to be correlated strongly with both the judged merit of the works produced in the experiment and with professional successyears later. Thebook leavesonewanting to understand better the authors’ broader concept of problem finding and its role in artistry. The general contrast drawn between problem solving and problem finding seems somewhat less clear than the authors’ specific measures of problem finding for the experiment. To find a conventional problem is to find a problem, but the authors do not want to count that as problem finding.They stress the finding of new problems with personal meaning for the artist; but such problems almost invariably are conventional problems in the sensethat they are variants of the grand problems ofdeath, love, freedom and so on that art has treated again and again. The authors identify problem finding with a more intuitive, holistic, unconscious mode of thought. But the students’ own accounts of how they drew contributed to the measures of problem finding: surely these accounts reflected partly conscious attitudes and strategies. Moreover, the authors emphasize that the most *Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. professionally successfulartist ‘talked repeatedly of the need for “originality” and “discovery” as the key to his work’. The foregoing demurs might be kept in mind while reading what is surely a major contribution to the understanding of creativity in the visual arts. Also of merit, The Creativity Question isa very different book. It surveysprior thinking...