The Myth of the Lone Creative Genius: Why Collective Artmaking Matters Now
The art world at large has long championed a myth: the lone creator. From gallery shows to book publishing, film production to music charts, cultural institutions and markets alike celebrate the individual creator, a genius of their chosen vocation, who seemingly creates in a vacuum. In the digital age, this perception of pure individualism has only intensified, reinforced by personal branding, follower counts and visibility as prerequisites for artistic survival and identity. However, the concept of the “lone creative genius” is neither natural nor universal—it is a historical construct shaped by particular cultural, political and economic forces.
Work across film, music and large-scale, cross-continent collaborative projects demonstrates the opposite: creativity thrives in collectivity. Directing films and music videos revealed how supposedly singular artistic achievements depend on the contributions of entire teams of skilled professionals. The prevailing agenda often pushes individuals forward as the front-facing source of creativity, but such recognition rarely reflects the collaborative networks behind the work. This realization has shaped a sustained commitment to building projects through collective authorship and challenging dominant paradigms of creation and circulation, especially those that center the experiences of marginalized communities.
Recent projects underscore this point. For over ten years, I have been working with an international community of artisans, fabricators and creators to create large-scale works across mediums. The MiG-21 Project brought together more than a hundred participants across two continents—from Johannesburg’s urban center, the rural landscapes of Mpumalanga and the coastal region of KwaZulu-Natal to Downtown Los Angeles. Four teams spanning five nationalities, multiple ethnic backgrounds and five primary languages bridged a 10-hour time difference to create a truly international collaboration. Each participant contributed unique expertise and cultural perspectives, illustrating the potential of global collective action.
Collective artmaking represents a radical reimagining of the creative practice itself—the work as a whole represents the shared narratives of those who contributed to its creation. This carries profound implications for social solidarity and political resistance in an era defined by neoliberal individualism and digital atomization.
The act of creating art together has a rich history as a means of resisting dominant cultural and political systems. From Soviet Constructivists in the 1920s to feminist art collectives of the 1970s, collaborative creation has often emerged during times of social upheaval and political struggle. Movements such as Dada, the Situationists and the Black Arts Movement all adopted group approaches that rejected individual authorship and sought to break down boundaries between art and everyday life, between creators and audiences. Contemporary art collectives build on these historical examples while responding to current conditions of digital capitalism and global inequality.
When centered on marginalized communities, collective art-making practices enable the pooling of resources, skills and social networks, creating pathways to visibility that may have been previously unavailable. Collective processes also surface forms of knowledge and aesthetic traditions that have been historically excluded from Western cultural hierarchies. The Zapatista principle of “walking while questioning” informs many Indigenous and decolonial art collectives, which emphasizes process over product and collective wisdom over individual expertise. These approaches expand the very definition of what art is and who it serves.
Despite its potential, collective artmaking faces systemic barriers within contemporary cultural economies. Funding structures, legal frameworks for intellectual property and exhibition formats remain oriented toward individual creators, making it difficult for collectives to secure resources and recognition. Even when collectives achieve visibility, they often face pressure to designate individual spokespeople or stars, reinforcing the very hierarchies they seek to challenge. Moreover, collectivity itself is not inherently progressive or resistant. The true radical potential of collective artmaking lies less in the final works produced than in the alternative social relationships created through collaborative processes.
In an era of increasingly isolated digital environments and urgent global challenges that require coordinated action, collective artmaking offers crucial lessons about working together across differences, sharing ownership of creative processes and generating meaning beyond markets, hierarchies and borders. As scholar Walter Mignolo argues, such approaches enact “epistemic disobedience” that disrupts the colonial underpinnings of Western aesthetic categories and evaluation systems. These processes remind us that resistance is not just about opposing what exists—it is also about the patient and collaborative work of creating alternatives. In a world that constantly insists that “There is no alternative” to competitive individualism, making art together may be one of our most potent forms of imagining something better.
