The nature of 'genius' as a socio-cultural and political phenomenon

April 21, 2023 3:38 PM

Lately, I've been thinking about how genius is recognized and celebrated. We often elevate a small group of artists every generation as geniuses and then ignore or downplay the art made by every other artist, but it seems that great art is made by all kinds of people, not just the canon of 'great artists'. I'd like to read more on this topic - can anyone recommend any particular thinkers, especially recent ones - like from critical theorists or later?
posted by clockworkjoe to Religion & Philosophy (11 answers total)

It’s not out yet, but Karl Hagstrom Miller’s book on amateur musicians will address this. Here’s a taste of what it’ll be about.
posted by umbú at 4:52 PM on April 21, 2023

Which specific topic are you interested in? If you are interested in a critical examination of the concept of genius, there is a lot of intellectual history work on that, specifically about how Immanuel Kant popularized the concept in the sense in which we think about it today, and on how it was understood and used in 18th century France (for example Ann Jefferson's "Genius in France").

If you are thinking also of the notion of genius in the domain of science and scientific discovery, there is work in recent philosophy of science that problematizes concepts like "genius" and "moment of discovery" as mythological narratives of sorts reflecting a culture that likes to revere individuals and discrete moments as being transformative, even if "discovery stories" come at the expense of accurately understanding the process of how scientific discoveries are made. Work by Augustine Brannigan is an example of that kind of critique.

Specifically when it comes to art, the sociological classic about the construction of "high art" is Pierre Bourdieu's "Distinction" where he talks about how taste, including taste for what we elevate to the status of "high art" does the invisible labor of reproducing class distinctions. Bourdieu is not an easy read, though.
posted by virve at 4:56 PM on April 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

I have this unattributed quote that I found at this site:

"Society is good at training talent but terrible at cultivating genius. Talented people are good at hitting targets others can’t hit, but geniuses find targets others can’t see. They are opposite modes of excellence. Talent is predictable, genius is unpredictable."
posted by forthright at 5:34 PM on April 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” -GK Chesterton

“Don’t player hate, participate.” - Unknown
posted by kevinbelt at 5:46 PM on April 21, 2023

In The Absolute Artist, Catherine Soussloff breaks down how the myth of the artist-genius has been socially constructed throughout western art history.
posted by kitschfrau at 10:38 PM on April 21, 2023

Response by poster: I think this video essay on a lesser known comic artist got me thinking about it. This guy influenced Frank Miller and countless other artists but he's not celebrated as a genius like the people he influenced.
posted by clockworkjoe at 10:47 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Liz Gilbert’s Ted Talk discusses the evolution of the concept of genius and how damaging our current concept of it is.

The slant is particularly about how we come to see specific people as being a genius rather than having a genius (like a kind of inspiring spirit that lives in the chimney and can choose to come out or not on any given day) so slightly adjacent to your question, but there’s some overlap in terms of how we come to put individuals on a pedestal, and it’s interesting and funny, and (obvs) only 18 minutes.
posted by penguin pie at 5:01 AM on April 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: From a feminist perspective, Linda Nochlin's "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" (1971) gets at this question really ably. You could also look at Virginia Woolf's classic essay, "If Shakespeare Had a Sister."
posted by correcaminos at 5:50 AM on April 22, 2023

Best answer: A broad interpretation of your question might lead to Pierre Bourdieu's The Field of Cultural Production. I don't think Bourdieu would take the idea of genius seriously but he is interested in how society produces its artistic canons, who gets included and why, and then why and how other work is left behind. His major work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste takes similar arguments out across culture more broadly.
posted by spibeldrokkit at 8:37 AM on April 22, 2023

Best answer: If you're interested in the idea of "genius" and how it has changed, take a look at Darrin McMahon's book Divine Fury: A History of Genius.
posted by brianogilvie at 9:32 AM on April 22, 2023

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction makes the point that, above a certain threshold of quality, what most separates similar works from each other is exposure. It shows how the seven Impressionist artists widely considered the best and most well-known are also the same seven artists included in a bequest from Gustave Caillebotte, a rich man and an artist who bought many of his friends' works, and asked that his collection be exhibited after his death. The long fight over whether they were art worth exhibiting or trash brought repeated, sustained attention to the artists, which led to them becoming markedly more well-known than other Impressionist artists, which led to people liking their works better because they were already familiar with them, which led to people attributing those feelings to the work's superior quality. The effect snowballs until today, those seven artists are more famous than other skilled artists of the same time. (Caillebotte himself was an artist -- we would likely know him better if he'd added his own paintings to his collection!)
posted by shirobara at 5:26 AM on April 24, 2023