The Dialectic of Creativity

Creative artists from David Bowie to Zaha Hadid address the tensions and contradictions of making

Why are we creative? Why are we not? In The Dialectic of Creativity, film director, author and producer Hermann Vaske explores these questions in conversations with Marina Abramovic, Vivienne Westwood, David Hockney, Georg Baselitz, Björk, Jeff Koons, Zaha Hadid, Christo, Yoko Ono, Damien Hirst, Jim Jarmusch, Shirin Neshat, David Bowie and many more of the most influential creatives of our time, identifying the stimuli as well as the beta blockers, the killers of creativity: spirituality, sex, money, fear, nurture, ambition versus censorship, self-censorship, bureaucracy, compromise, distraction, gatekeepers. But often it is these very blockages, the threat to creativity that makes it thrive. Today, as we are facing an existential threat to our planet, it is time to come up with new ideas, to be more creative than ever. The Dialectic of Creativity explores creativity in all its facets—artistic, intellectual, philosophical and scientific.