Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and two years of ethnographic research in the New York contemporary art market, Hannah develops a sociological perspective on creativity through the analytic lens of judgment. As she reveals, artists do not think of creative results as objectively good or bad, but instead pursue ideas that they view as relevant to their creative visions—bundles of core and enduring elements within their oeuvres. Artists' perceptions of creative visions arise through the process of experimentation and are continually reshaped as artists produce new works and ascertain how their works are interpreted by others.
Building from these empirical observations, Hannah will end with some comparisons between artistic and academic creativity.