The Examination of Creativity in Traditional Art

Abstract

Creativity is one of the most common notions in art studies. In modern world, being an artist and being creative are identical and often creativity is considered to be akin to novelty. Moreover, it seems to be common belief that traditional art shows a high occurrence of borrowing, repetition, use of conventional themes and disregard for novelty and originality. Although in modern point of view creativity and even authenticity are identical with newness and considered that traditional art lacks it, there are some philosophers such as Ananda Coomaraswamy, Titus Burckhardt, Rene Guenon, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Anne marie Schimmel, who believe that not only traditional art is creative but also it is the sole kind of art which is really creative. But the question which arises here is whether one can speak of creativity in traditional art in a strict sense? In fact an artistic school transfers the framework of education, the production of works and creativity. By doing so, it can guarantee the identity of artistic works. The derived conclusions in this paper show traditional art has got some principles which according to them, it would be possible to speak of creativity in a strict sense.