Apple Gets Creativity Wrong
It cannot be compressed into a shiny new iPad. There’s more to it than that.
In his book Show Your Work, artist and writer Austin Kleon describes how wealthy, fashionable Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries had Wunderkammern, or “wonder chambers,” in their homes. Also known as “cabinets of curiosities,” these rooms were filled with rare or remarkable objects that signified a hunger for knowledge about the world.
Kleon wrote, “Inside a cabinet of curiosities, you might find books, skeletons, jewels, shells, art, plants, minerals, taxidermy specimens, stones, or any other exotic artifact.” People used their wonder chambers as a launching point for intellectual exploration.
We’re no different today. We might not have dusty skeletons rattling around a spare room in a sprawling country estate, but it’s still deeply ingrained in human nature to feel inspired or spurred to creative action or contemplation by seeing physical objects in our surrounding environment. Kleon agrees:
“We all have our own treasured collections. They can be physical cabinets of curiosities, say, living room bookshelves full of our favorite novels, records, and movies, or they can be more like intangible museums of the heart, our skulls lined with memories of places we’ve been, people we’ve met, experiences we’ve accumulated… There’s not as big of a difference between collecting and creating as you might think.”
In other words, the stuff we surround ourselves with and interact with daily becomes the basis of our creativity. It’s both the fuel (we must have good inputs in order to have good outputs) and the stimulus. Often, it’s by seeing, handling, and being reminded of things that we are pulled/pushed to engage with them—and get better at using them.
So, perhaps it’s no wonder that I reacted so strongly to Apple’s promotional video for its new iPad Pro. Titled “Crush!”, the 1-minute clip depicts a room full of the most wonderful art supplies and musical instruments one could imagine, all getting crushed in a giant press. Guitar strings pop, cans of paint pour onto a piano that’s being flattened, record players implode, a trumpet gets flattened along with a stack of paper notebooks, a human bust and figurine are crushed into cruel oblivion.
Destruction complete, the press lifts to reveal a shiny new iPad. The only words spoken: “The most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest.” The takeaway message: This is all you need. All of creativity has been compressed into this one single device.
I watched it three times in a row. Then I showed my husband, a musician, who winced at the sight of instruments being destroyed, and said, “That’s horrific. What idiot came up with that?” I pointed out that we’d just watched it 4 times in a row—something I’ve never done for any Apple promotional video, ever—so clearly, they’d done something right. After all, outrage sells, and there’s no such thing as bad publicity, right? (A friend told me Apple has received a lot of backlash for the video and has since released a less controversial follow-up.)
But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this audacious claim that we can somehow compress the raw materials and ingredients of creativity—the exact same tools that have fueled creativity for centuries and resulted in masterpieces like Michelangelo’s La Pietà and Monet’s Water Lilies and Bach’s Goldberg Variations—into a single sleek digital device, and then fall for the preposterous notion that it’s somehow equivalent.
Related: On Filling the Void
The Necessity of Physicality
It overlooks the basic fact illustrated by cabinets of curiosities, that we humans are embodied creature and must engage physically with the stuff of our surroundings in order to feel stimulated, inspired, and encouraged to try interacting with our creative tools in innovative ways. This is also how artistic interpretation or progress occurs.
I do not deny that the iPad Pro is an astounding example of technological achievement. No doubt it can do many wonderful things. I am quite attached to my MacBook Air. But I also know that when I spend too much time staring at my word processor and too little time engaging in the real world, I run out of ideas for writing. That’s when I pick up real books to read in my hammock, brainstorm in a Moleskine notebook with a great-feeling pen, weed the garden, practice my orchestral violin parts, or go for a long walk. Only then do the thoughts start flowing again, at which point the device is a welcome tool to receive, manipulate, and send them out into the world. But I’d be foolish to think it’s the source of those thoughts, or that I could possibly produce what I do without interacting with a bigger real world.
The iPad ad assumes that creativity is entirely innate. I do not believe that. Some of it resides within us, of course, but much of it must be stimulated by the outside world. We humans must continually build our own cabinets of curiosities for those inevitable times at which we feel our creative springs starting to run dry. The machine cannot give inspiration to us.
A Return to Maximalism?
During the covid lockdown, I wrote an article for Treehugger called “In Praise of Maximalism,” which described how relieved I suddenly felt at having random stuff lying around my house. It was all stuff I’d previously wanted to get rid of, but hadn’t gotten around to, things like art supplies, educational books, board games, beauty products, and specialized cooking equipment. Suddenly, my family was putting it all to good use, no longer able to rely on the sharing economy or convenient shopping options that had spurred so many households to purge surplus items in previous years.
While I’ve always disliked superfluous clutter, that experience totally changed my attitude toward having seemingly useless stuff in a home. I realized then that, particularly for kids, it’s critical to have loose parts lying around—not just toys, but other stuff, too, that can be repurposed in ways you might not foresee.
I tell parents now in the talks I give on digital minimalism that it’s necessary to embrace a certain level of chaos and messiness in the home, to accept stray items and partially built projects as an inevitable part of raising offline kids. It’s a small price to pay for a life bursting with creativity.
The Need for Friction
When I showed the iPad video to one of my young sons and asked which he’d prefer, the iPad or the room full of art supplies and musical instruments, he said, “The iPad, obviously, because I could just do other stuff on it. Like, play games.” Alas, he was not being facetious.
But his interesting answer raised yet another issue with this iPad, and digital devices in general—the fact that they offer innumerable other distractions (Netflix! YouTube! Social media! Games!), all in the exact same place where, presumably, you’re also supposed to create your great works of art. Few people can resist the allure of doing other things. These devices offer instant gratification and immediate portals into activities that capture our attention and consume our time.
And yet, we need that friction—that slightly tense and uncomfortable in-between stage of knowing you need/want to do something but not knowing quite how—to get into the creative projects that contain the greatest value for us. Always having the option of something else to do is not conducive to digging deep into our creative reservoirs. There’s a reason why some writers use Internet-blocking software and other hacks to get their jobs done.
All That We Lose
One final thought on this iPad promo, inspired by Freya India writing for After Babel. She said that many people were horrified by the ad, but pointed out that many of us are already complicit in flattening art, creativity, and everything that’s real and human when we spend so much time online.
“Aren’t we doing that all the time? Crushing our own intimate moments into content? Grinding our real-life experiences into something good for an Instagram grid? Compressing our lives, experiences, and memories into something other people can consume?”
Let’s not flatten ourselves. Let’s not become the proverbial “pancake people” that I talked about in my own book, using a haunting descriptor from playwright Richard Foreman, who warns against an Internet-dependent population becoming being drained of its “inner repertory of dense cultural heritage” by outsourcing all information and connection to a vast web that spreads us wide and thin and is accessed by the touch of a button.
It goes beyond information. Our souls and spirits risk becoming flattened and compressed by handing over the roots of creativity to devices, too.
You Might Also Like:
The Internet Takes the Amazon
Yes, Please Talk to My Kid!
The Apex Creature
Interesting News Stories:
Group of 17 London secondary schools join up to go smartphone-free (Guardian)
Alone and Unafraid: What Can We Learn From the Life of a Hermit? (Slate)
How Internet addiction may affect your teen’s brain, according to a new study (CTV News)
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