Imagination is NOT Creativity

Today, someone suggested that Imagination is equal to Creativity. This is not the case.

Imagination is, by its very nature, free and unstructured. Imagination damns the constraints of the real world and simply wanders, it thinks without boundary, creates without creating. This is not to be confused with Creativity.

Creativity is the act of bringing structure to Imagination. Creativity tames Imagination and manifests the ideas generated by Imagination into an object in the real world. Creativity restricts Imagination to the limitations of reality (such as gravity) and produces an object within that world.

To call Imagination the equivalent of Creativity is to overlook the fundamental difference in the two: Imagination is unbounded. Creativity expands reality by taming Imagination to fit the constraints of the real world.

Simply put, Creativity is Imagination, but Imagination is NOT Creativity.

Art Is NOT Innovation

Creativity, Innovation, and Imagination. Each of these concepts are intimately related, with Imagination at the very core. But where does Creativity become Innovation, and how does this relate to our overarching discussion of the nature of Art?

Creativity and Innovation require Imagination. Without Imagination, the other two cannot possibly exist. Creativity flows from Imagination, and Innovation from Creativity. And Art, of course, requires, first and foremost, Imagination.

Of course, Imagination does not Art make. Imagination must be tamed and captured, expressed, brought into the world by Creativity. And this is where Art ends. Art is Creative; it is not Innovative.

Why? Because of the nature of what Innovation is. Innovation involves taking a creation and mass marketing it, making it readily available for practical, everyday use. To draw an analogy, the cotton gin was first a creation. When it went into production and became widely used in growing cotton, it loses the status of "Creation" and instead gains "Innovation." It is no longer unique.

To draw another analogy, apple pie. The first apple pie was a creation of some imaginitive baker. To make an apple pie NOW is not an act of Creativity unless you are making a new recipe, and even then, it will lose that status of being "Creative" as soon as you copy it and make it a second time, or someone else copies it. Then it is "Innovation." "Creativity" produces a unique, one of a kind object that can never be reproduced. "Innovation" by its very nature is reproducable and reproduced.

Art cannot (and SHOULD NOT) be reduced to the mass-market, watered down status of Innovation. It must by necessity end at Creativity.