OLLI presents “Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art is Created and Judged”

An online talk by Professor Hannah Wohl 

author of  

Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged

Tuesday, March 22, 7 pm

Online via Zoom. Free and Open to All.

Click here to register online.

What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is profoundly influenced by social interactions even when artists work alone. Sociologist Hannah Wohl draws on more than one hundred interviews and two years of ethnographic research in the New York contemporary art market to develop a rich sociological perspective of creativity. From inside the studio, we see how artists experiment with new ideas and decide which works to abandon, destroy, put into storage, or exhibit. Wohl then transports readers into the art world, where we discover how artists’ understandings of their work are shaped through interactions in studio visits, galleries, international art fairs, and collectors’ homes.

Bound by Creativity reveals how artists develop conceptions of their distinctive creative visions through experimentation and social interactions. Ultimately, we come to appreciate how judgment is integral to the creative process, both resulting in the creation of original works while also limiting an artist’s ability to break new ground. Exploring creativity through the lens of judgment sheds new light on the production of cultural objects, markets, and prestige. 

Hannah Wohl is a native of the Berkshires and an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her PhD in sociology at Northwestern University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. Her research examines judgment and decision-making in creative industries, such as art, literature, technology, and academia. Her work has been published in leading sociology journals and has won prizes from the American Sociological Association.