"Creativity wants to be authored"

I just offered that as an antidote maxim to "Information wants to free" over at Rob Hyndman's blog. Also in my comment I wrote such a pithy capsule of ideas I've blogged about lately that I wanted to incorporate and offer it here as a summary.

"Creativity wants to be authored" ought to be the maxim, at least to my mind. "Monetarily free" creativity I can imagine. But "authoritatively free" I cannot--or I haven't been able to think of a real precedent for a culture or society that works that way. After all, why do good works if a) no one sees you do them and b) there's no money or title or prize to show others in the abstract that you do good works for a living? I think that generally the desire for prestige and influence motivate creativity and that often creators accept money instead, or they accept it as payment-in-part, because wealth and the things you can buy betoken status and confer prestige and influence. What creators are after in the first place, in other words.