What is creativity?

We think we know. Then someone tapes a banana to a wall and calls it art. Or a computer paints a dream that could hang beside a Monet. Suddenly, definitions start to slip.

In 2019, Maurizio Cattelan did exactly that. He taped a banana to the wall and called it “Comedian.” It sold for $120,000. Crowds came. Some laughed. One man ate the banana. The gallery calmly taped up another. “The banana is the idea,” the director said, like someone explaining the joke after the punchline.

It wasn’t about fruit. It was about friction—between object and observer, meaning and absurdity. One collector even compared it to Warhol’s Soup Cans, not because of the subject, but because of how long we stared at it as if it mattered. 

It wasn’t beautiful, nor did it have anything technically complex. But it had a pulse. At first, I thought the artist was just lazy. Still, I could feel someone behind the work, poking fun at the very idea of art with something so simple yet somehow so controversial.

Maybe creativity isn’t about what’s made. Maybe it’s about why. That electric urge to reach across the gap and make someone feel something—confusion, discomfort, wonder, delight. We know it when it hits. Or when it doesn’t. Personally, it hits when I feel the artist’s intent and find myself suspended in their world, trying to understand something I wasn’t meant to until that moment.

Now AI steps in. Not to ruin art, but to reflect it back. Algorithms can draw, compose, imitate. And they’re good. So good that, in certain studies, people can't reliably tell which art is human and which is machine. Our guesses are as random as coin flips.

But once we know what’s human, we prefer it. Not for how it looks, but how it feels. A researcher put it simply: we expect art to give off something human. Machines don’t have that to give. 

Cory Doctorow calls AI art eerie—“the seeming of intent, without any intender.” It looks like someone cared. But no one did. There’s no joke tucked under the paint. No memory. No mischief. Just a mirror that blinks when you do.

Long before AI, Tolstoy and Dewey had already figured this out. Tolstoy said art is about feeling. Without that, it’s just wallpaper. Dewey called art a way to express and invite others in, a secret handshake between minds.

Creativity isn’t just about making something new. It’s about making something new that also surprises us and makes us feel like it matters. Margaret Boden says creative work must be new, surprising, and valuable. AI can do the first two. It can generate things that are unfamiliar or unexpected. But value is trickier. That comes from intent, context, and guts. That’s why a human taping a banana to a wall can feel more daring than a machine remixing a hundred styles. Machines remix. Humans revolt.

Maybe that’s the spark. Not just novelty, but nerve. A banana taped to a wall isn’t clever because of what it is. It’s clever because someone dared us to call it nothing. And we couldn’t.

Creativity doesn’t come from perfection. It grows from mess. From risk. Perfectionism kills it by shrinking risk and flexibility. Fear of mistakes holds people back. Openness and empathy allow ideas to flow. People who are afraid to be wrong make fewer new things. People who are willing to be wrong? They surprise us.

Maybe creativity lives in that in-between. In the mess. In the moment before the brush hits the canvas. The banana may make us laugh. The AI may hold our gaze. But only one feels like someone’s still there, thinking with us.

Creativity might not be a product at all. It might be the silence between two minds, the glance, the joke only half-told. The shiver that says someone else stood here. Thinking. Feeling. Trying. When I see a painting, I don’t just see the image. I see the hours behind it. The strain, the frustration, the effort to make it mean something. That’s what reaches me.

As long as we’re still asking what creativity means, we haven’t lost it. As long as we’re still taping bananas to walls, the ghost is still with us.