Italian designer Enzo Mari once said that there is no word today more obscene, unhealthier than creativity. He believed that this concept is excessively idolized and misused in modern society, particularly in the fields of design and art.
Paolo Tassinari, another Italian designer, also expressed the same view in the fourth dialogue of the China-Europe-America Museums Cooperation Initiative. “In this hectic society, the term creativity has lost most of its power and it is often considered as a good ingredient for any everyday recipe - this is a very marketing-related thing.”
However, Paolo also suggested that we should perhaps go beyond such judgments and delve deeper into the origins of “creativity”, urging us to rebuild our understanding of this core concept.
Paolo’s Full Speech
In Greek mythology, creativity and the arts were governed by the nine Muses, who symbolized the highest ideals of art. The Muses inspired passion in people through contemplation of the beauty of nature, much like the emotional release and celebration of life's vitality found in the worship of Dionysus.
Paolo argued, “It is to a bad copy of this context, in my view, that an impoverished and trivialized notion of creativity leads back.” He believes that nowadays there is a double misunderstanding of creativity: that creativity is a priori, ungovernable and beyond one’s control, but at the same time, everyone can access it in a moment of grace.
Parnassus by Raphael
As a designer, Paolo, on the contrary, believes that creativity is a prerequisite of design that needs to be actively cultivated through efforts. He used Vittorio Gregotti’s words and further defined creativity as the “ability for modification in a critical and conscious way”, emphasizing that true design is different from merely pursing novelty.
To illustrate this point, Paolo shared a new museum project he undertook in the old docks of Trieste, a port city in Italy.
The exterior of the museum
In this design process, Paolo was confronted with the need to keep trace of some basic concepts through design: places, men, labor, goods, and travel. This is reflected in a typographic installation on one wall, where words like spanners, bolts, rollers, and hooks call back the original contents of the warehouse. The installation consists of 750 letters and 1500 screws. Outside the museum, a buffer zone is marked by mooring bollards and more typographic installations.
Through words and letters, the memory takes viewers back to the original material nature.
Typographic installations
Therefore, Paolo concluded by emphasizing that when discussing museums and creativity, we should view creativity in a broader context, as a tool. This tool must be supported by knowledge and culture. Only then can we truly harness the transformative power of creativity to enrich our cultural institutions and society as a whole.
Paolo Tassinari Founder of Tassinari/Vetta, Trieste, Graphic Designer
Paolo Tassinari has worked in the field of visual design dealing with publishing, visual identity and exhibition design for the institutional and cultural world since the late 1970s; in 1984 with Pierpaolo Vetta he founded the Tassinari/Vetta studio in Trieste. A member of the AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale), he teaches and has lectured in Italy, the Middle East, and Australia; in 2011 he was awarded the Compasso d'oro/ADI for his work on the Napoli Teatro Festival Italia.
