Open creation is a statement not only of a form of artistic practice; it is a declaration of war against systems that seek to enclose creative practices on a dogma of strict systems, hierarchies, and myths of power. These critics of open creation are not always out-and-out hostility. They frequently identify themselves as system-builders, as classifiers, as self-appointed custodians of culture, as individuals who are meant to synthesize, organize, and even complete human creativity when, in actuality, they are strangling it to death.
It is a conflict between open and experimental creativity and closed and dogmatic systems that lies at the heart of this conflict. Open creation recognizes that culture is dynamic rather than whole, and shared. It exists in contradiction, play, error, and transformation. Its opponents, in their turn, are assured in linear evolution, hierarchies, and the influence of the so-called innovator, unique in his perception and leaving the rest of humankind as mere spectators.
These regimes have a tendency to assimilate the vocabulary of science, philosophy or revolution and empty it of its emancipatory potential. They measure creativity as factory production, confuse quantity with value, and identify repetition and innovation. The result of it is a culture of producing, as opposed to producing, books, theories, and manifestos, which do not interact with reality but are used to support the author in an imaginary hierarchy of merit.
Open creation does not purchase this line of thought at all. It disbelieves the myth of the individual genius and verifies the collective experimentation. Creation is not a high-handed secret and closed system to memorise and repeat. It is a continuous process, a process which occurs as situations – situations as lived experience, play, conflict, and everyday life in its continual recreation. The state of uncertainty, risk, and failure are the precondition of freedom to which open creation is an invitation.
The such a direction is often accused by opponents as promoting chaos, nihilism, or irresponsibility. The fact is their systems are the bad ones. Among the items of subverting culture to obedience is the necessity of clinging to one future, one truth, or one myth. Their fixation on permanence and power demonstrates that they have a fear of change. To multiply the closed heaven they prefer, To assurance of doctrine to contradiction of life.
Open creation, on the contrary, accepts plurality. It acknowledges that culture never dies, as doctrines fall and certainties are forgotten. It does not object to saving the past or pre-determining the future, but rather to creating the present. This invention cannot be measured by standardized methods or evaluated by institutions constructed to preserve the status quo.
After all, the fight against open creation and those against it is not limited to art or theory. It is a battle of establishing how individuals live, study, want, and fantasize. Open creation demands the right of all people, not only young people, but also artists and intellectuals, to take an active role in creating their conditions of existence themselves.
The defense of open creation is the denial of any pretensions of ultimate control in culture. It is to demand that creativity should be incomplete, unpossessed, and unowned. Its adversaries will come to construct systems, classifications, and threats, but open production will continue — because it invents itself in every case where freedom is not turned into obedience.
