Artistic freedom realised

The fewer the constraints we encounter in an artistic endeavour, the greater our artistic freedom; as technology advances and presents us with more numerous options and ever-greater creative flexibility, so our artistic freedom burgeons. Such is the folk wisdom on the phenomenon. Is the wisdom wise? Many artists and art theorists think not; for Stravinsky, “[t]he more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit”. I consider the orthodox view and this alternative view through an exploration of the constraints arising from physical, psychological, and technological factors, as well as the heterogeneous array of routine practices we label “conventions”. To deepen the analysis, I turn to the “problem-solving” perspective on artistic creativity, examining the interplay between invention and convention in art, drawing on a variety of examples from film and rock music. On the theory advanced by Jon Elster, the problems with which artists engage arise from a mix of chosen, imposed, and invented constraints; on the theory of David Bordwell, those problems can be solved through the replication, revision, synthesis, or rejection of existing solutions. I conclude that neither the folk theory, nor the alternative theory, are correct; rather, there is a “sweet zone” of artistic creativity poised between a disabling surfeit of options, and a stifling sparsity of them. I argue that Stravinsky’s counter-theory of artistic creativity, though not literally true, acts as a “felicitous falsehood”—an epistemically valuable overcorrection.