Psychological tests of creativity, like IQ tests, allowed for the ranking of different kinds of people (Cohen-Cole, 2009). Guilford discussed the need to construct tests to measure individuals' creative abilities, considering other creative individuals. He was not alone. This comparative way of reasoning about individuals was making the creative person and crystalizing its characteristics through certain kinds of expected behaviors that produced differences among different people. Creative people, for instance, were more likely to enjoy modern art, particularly abstract expressionism. The artists, the psychologist Frank Barron explained, “liked figures free-hand rather than ruled, and rather restless and moving in the general effect” (Barron, 1953 , p. 164). The figures enjoyed by the non-artists were classified by the creatives as “static,” “dull,” and “uninteresting.” Barron was reporting the results of the Barron-Welsh Art Scale, a figure preference test that aimed to search for measures of the ability to discriminate “good from the poor in artistic productions” (Barron, 1953 , p. 164). The test was composed of an adjective checklist, from which the participant had to select those adjectives which they thought described themselves and of 105 postcard-size reproductions in color of European artworks. Based on the obtained results, two kinds of people emerged: the simple and the complex. This was due to, Barron explained, a level of complexity, flexibility, and openness to the new that only creatives possessed:
“The preference for Complexity is clearly associated with originality, artistic expression, and excellence of aesthetic judgment. . . . The Complex person is seen as more original. . . . Complexity is also related to Basic Good Taste as measured by a test which presents various alternative arrangements of formal design elements. . . . What can be said is that originality and artistic creativeness and discrimination are related to the preference for complexity.”
The tests produced data as evidence, and with this, different kinds of people were becoming possible. The characters were not free of moral judgments. The highly creative person was complex, in opposition to the simple person. Geographically situated in the United States, in Barron’s study, two brains were in dispute: the authoritarian brain was representational, and the creative mind was performative and adaptive to unexpected situations, and it was at least said to be open to diversity. Abstract expressionism, as it suppressed representation, represented freedom of expression in an open society. Simultaneously, this was the kind of art that was prohibited by the “Hitlers” and “Stalins” (Cockroft, 1974). Creativity was thus fabricated, having specific kinds of people in its agenda, and worked as a classification that was based on individual capacities that marked the line between inclusion and exclusion.
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