In the late 1980s, a former trial lawyer named Denise Shekerjian read a newspaper article about the MacArthur Fellowship. The “genius grant,” people called it. It came with a mysterious phone call, a generous six-figure award paid with no strings attached, and the kind of cultural recognition that changes a life.
Shekerjian was not interested in the money or the prestige. She was interested in the people. She wanted to know what made them what they were.
She interviewed forty MacArthur Fellows from every field imaginable: artists, scientists, composers, filmmakers, a Mayan epigraphist, a theoretical physicist, the founder of a planetary sustainability institute. She asked them the same question from different angles: how do you do what you do?
The result was a 1991 book called Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas Are Born. It is slim, near-forgotten, and the most useful book about creativity I have ever read.
Shekerjian’s MacArthur Fellows weren’t the people you would expect. Many of them didn’t know they were exceptional. Some of them had been told they weren’t.
Stephen Jay Gould, the paleontologist and essayist, told Shekerjian something that became the book’s first principle. He said the problem with talent is that it feels like being yourself. “The things you’re good at come naturally,” he said. “And since most people are pretty modest, what comes naturally, you don’t see as a special skill. It’s just you. It’s what you’ve always done.”
Gould’s gift was making connections. He could sit down on almost any subject and immediately identify twenty genuine, non-trivial threads binding it to other domains. He could read eight hundred articles and see the single argument that held them together. And for years he assumed everyone did this. He didn’t know he was special because being him didn’t feel special.
Staying Loose#
Shekerjian’s most important discovery has a name that sounds like advice from a friend: staying loose.
The popular mythology of creativity is the a-ha moment. The flash of insight, the light bulb, the sudden breakthrough. Shekerjian found something more uncomfortable. Her MacArthur Fellows didn’t wait for inspiration to arrive in a clean room. They entered chaos deliberately. They protected the period of not-knowing. They refused to converge before they had to.
“Cut short of the floundering,” Shekerjian writes, “and you’ve cut short the possible creative outcomes. Cheat on the chaotic stumbling-about, and you’ve robbed yourself of the raw stuff that feeds the imagination.”
For most people, ambiguity is exhausting. We want clean resolutions, clear answers, yes or no. Creative people, Shekerjian found, do the opposite. “They seem to have a great tolerance for the ambiguous circumstances that begin most projects,” she writes. “They are more willing to entertain a prolonged period of leisurely drifting about, curious to see where the unpredictable currents will take them.”
The staying loose concept is deceptively simple to state and brutally hard to practice. The reason is not internal. It is external. The world does not want you to stay loose. It wants you to converge. Deadlines, markets, expectations, the people who depend on you: they all want answers before you have had time to flounder.
More than that, the world rewards convergence. The person who has a plan is promoted before the person who is still asking questions. The executive who decides quickly is praised as decisive. The culture that produces and ships is called effective. The staying loose posture is open, uncertain, wandering. It looks from the outside like not working. It looks like procrastination or confusion or a lack of direction.
This is why staying loose is not a passive state. It is an active defense. You are not drifting because you lack direction. You are drifting because the premature answer is worse than the open question. You are holding the space open against a force that is trying to close it. The pressure to converge is constant and it comes from every direction. People want to know what you are doing and when it will be done and what it will look like when it arrives. You push back because the answer is not ready yet and you know that forcing it early will kill what it could become.
You have to fight for the space to be free.
A Master of Uncertainty#
Frederick Wiseman exemplifies this fight more perfectly than anyone I know. Wiseman is the documentary filmmaker who enters institutions with no script, no narration, no interviews, no predetermined conclusion. He walks into a prison, a hospital, a high school, a public housing complex with “only a very broadly constructed feeling for the subject matter, almost no preparation or research, and as few preconceptions as possible.”
He wanders. He lingers. He observes. He does not direct the people he films. He does not stage the action. He does not know what the film is about until he has 90 hours of footage on his editing table.
Then he spends a year editing it into a two-hour film.
In a Paris Review interview, Wiseman described his process this way: “I have no idea, in advance, of the film’s structure or what its point of view will be. It evolves from studying the material.” He calls editing “a process that combines the rational and the nonrational.”
Shekerjian calls him “a master of uncertainty, the grandmaster of the documentary.”
Wiseman reads poetry and studies visual art to see “how others have solved some of the same problems he faces.” This is what Shekerjian calls connected irrelevance: importing from domains that seem unrelated to the work, because the unrelated input is often the source of the breakthrough. The cross-domain practice is not a break from the work. It is part of the method.
Constraint is the Medium#
Here is the part that matters most.
The MacArthur Fellows did not wait for the right conditions to arrive. They engineered them. The poet Joseph Brodsky listened to music to enhance his composition. The filmmaker Frederick Wiseman reads poetry to improve his documentaries. The physicist Albert Einstein played the violin between breakthroughs. The painter chooses a limited palette and works inside it. The poet picks a form and lets the constraint shape the expression. They treated their creative conditions as non-negotiable requirements, the way athletes treat their physical preparation.
A psychologist writing about her own creative process put it this way: “All the constraints of proper scientific process actually enhance creativity. In painting, there is a saying: ‘If it’s everywhere, it’s nowhere.’ You need to have some constraints, otherwise it’s just chaos. Think about poetry, about sonnets, about haikus. They’re all very prescribed. But you can express anything within those rules.” (The British Psychological Society, “Voices of Psychology: What Does Creativity Mean to Me”)
Constraint is not the enemy of creativity. It is the medium.
There is an artist working today who has turned this insight into an entire career, and he has done it without anyone knowing his name.
Banksy’s canvases are the walls of buildings he does not own. He works at night, under the threat of arrest. His work can be painted over, scraped off, or cut out and sold before he has finished it. He cannot control how long the work lasts, who sees it, or whether it ends up in an auction house it was never meant for. Every condition that most artists would consider a deal-breaker is the only condition he has ever known.
And his work matters because of those constraints, not in spite of them.
Think about what happened in 2018 at Sotheby’s. A painting called Girl With Balloon sold for just over a million pounds. The moment the hammer fell, a shredder hidden inside the frame activated. The bottom half of the canvas came out in strips, tattered and hanging. The crowd gasped. The buyer, whoever they were, had just purchased a piece that had publicly destroyed itself. Banksy titled the new work Love is in the Bin.
This was not a stunt. It was a thesis statement delivered in the medium the art market could not ignore. The system that determines what art is worth had met something that refused to be priced. The constraint of the art market, the fact that anything can be bought and sold if it has a name attached, is exactly what the shredder attacked. Banksy could not fix the art market. He could only refuse to let it define what his work was.
The same impulse drives everything he does. In 2017, he opened a hotel in Bethlehem called the Walled Off Hotel, with rooms facing the Israeli separation wall. The rooms have the worst view in the world, he advertised. He painted murals on the barrier itself, knowing they would fade and be painted over. The constraint of the wall was the medium. In 2015, he built a dystopian theme park called Dismaland in a seaside town, a full-scale critique of consumer culture disguised as a family outing. The entrance was designed to look like Cinderella’s castle collapsing. The lifeguard in the pool was a plastic body floating face-down. It was open for 36 days and then dismantled, exactly as planned. The work was not meant to last. It was meant to exist in the moment, in the place, and then be gone.
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Banksy appeared in Kyiv and painted murals on bombed buildings: a gymnast performing a handstand on the rubble, a small boy flipping a much larger man in a judo match, an old woman in a bathrobe holding a gas mask like a bouquet. The murals were not authorized. He was not invited. He went anyway, painted them anyway, and left. The work that survives is the work that was not supposed to be there.
This is the creative impulse as resistance made literal. Every piece is an act of refusal: refusal to ask permission, refusal to be priced, refusal to let the available categories define what matters. And the anonymity is not a gimmick. It is the same principle extended to the artist’s own identity. The work cannot be captured by the market if the market doesn’t know who made it. The artist stays loose by refusing to be pinned down, even about who they are.
The MacArthur Fellowship recognizes the same principle that drives Banksy’s work, but in a radically different way. It comes with $800,000 paid over five years, no strings attached. No reports. No deliverables. The foundation explicitly says: “The fellowship is not a reward for past accomplishments but rather an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential.” It is the most radical creative infrastructure an American institution can provide. And it only reaches about twenty-five people a year. The rest of us have to build our own.
For the Love of It#
Ellen Stewart was the founder of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York City. She was also the culminating example of Shekerjian’s entire book, the figure around whom the final chapter is built.
Stewart had no theater experience when she started. She was a dress designer at Saks Fifth Avenue. She founded La MaMa in 1961 in a basement apartment to help her foster brother get his plays produced. She kept working at Saks for eleven years, pouring her fashion income into the theater.
Her life before La MaMa included this: as a child in the Jim Crow South, she won a design contest. When she went to collect her prize, she received a smack in the mouth for having had “the audacity to enter it” as a Black woman.
She founded the theater anyway.
Under Stewart’s direction, La MaMa grew from one basement to four theaters, seven floors of rehearsal space, a gallery, an archive, and an international artists’ complex in Spoleto, Italy. It has presented more than 1,900 productions featuring artists from over 70 countries. It still produces 50 to 90 shows a year. MacArthur named her a Fellow in 1985.
Shekerjian ends Uncommon Genius with Stewart’s story because Stewart represents the deepest truth the MacArthur Fellows revealed: creativity and love are inseparable. Genius flows from an inexhaustible capacity to love the work and the people who do it. Stewart was not driven by ambition. She was driven by love. She said, “La MaMa is a lot of people. Every corner of the earth, there are people whose energies and heartbeats, some part of which is directed towards La MaMa, and with that kind of thing holding up, honey, we don’t sink.”
The Creative Impulse as Resistance#
The MacArthur Fellows weren’t quitters. Shekerjian writes: “Even in the face of insult. Or when confronted with defeat. Or when up against humiliation, despondency, hostility, boredom, or indifference. They find a way to make adjustments, to keep at it, to stay buoyant, to believe in themselves.”
“The trick to creativity,” Shekerjian concludes, “if there is a single useful thing to say about it, is to identify your own peculiar talent and then to settle down to work with it for a good long time.”
But the staying loose concept suggests the trick is incomplete. The settling down is only half the work. The other half is actively defending the floundering. Keeping the space open when the world wants it closed. Fighting for the conditions under which your peculiar talent can actually do its thing.
This is why the creative impulse is also an act of resistance. Not because creativity is political in the obvious sense. Because the creative act is a refusal to let the cage define what is possible. Making something that did not exist before, in a form that did not demand to be made, when the world was not asking for it and will not pay for it until it exists. The push against the convergence pressure is not a separate activity from the creative work. It is the creative work. You cannot settle down with your peculiar talent for a good long time unless you are also pushing back against everything that tells you to settle for something smaller.
You push because that is what a creature with something to express does when you try to contain it.
The cage isn’t what stops you. The cage is what the work is made of.