no genius
Do you believe in genius? I don’t. Not a thing. Not when it comes to art, anyway.
Kind of weird how some people really need to believe in genius. Even if they know they’re not a genius, they want someone else to be one. Because then they can say, “I’m smart, because I like this smart guy. I’m doing something big and important by reading this big, important book.”
It’s such a bombastic, macho idea. Doesn’t fit my understanding of art at all. Such a demiurge idea.
People who believe in genius overlook things that are small and quiet. They think art is all about big, important people creating big, important things that shape the world. I disagree.
I see art as something more rhizomatic and small-scale. It’s personal and intimate. And it allows you relief from the rigid real world. In real life, things are loud and set in stone. In fiction, things are always shifting quietly.
And it’s important to keep in mind who gets overlooked and why. Who gets to be seen as the big, important artist? Who doesn’t?
To quote Stephen Jay Gould: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
Sometimes I’ll see articles or posts online complaining about the lack of genius in the present. People will claim there were so many great thinkers in the good old days, but now they’re all gone. This is silly.
A lot of the time, the people we call genius just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Not diminishing their work. Just saying that they were the ones lucky enough to have their work recognised. To get published, etc. And there weren’t so many ways to get published or recognised in the past. Only a small number got big. And getting big doesn’t make you the best. The cream doesn’t always rise to the top.
The artists we see as genius are probably showing us what we want to see. Telling us what we want to hear. Even if they challenge us, they’re doing it in a way we’re comfortable with. The ones we dismiss are doing it in a way we don’t like.
That’s why I don’t want to call any artist a genius, even ones I love and admire. If I hadn’t discovered them, someone else would have filled their place, in their own way.
And to be honest, you’re kind of insulting someone by calling them a genius. You’re not letting them be a fallible person.
If you can’t admit to yourself that a person you admire can make mistakes, you end up insulting yourself too. You put yourself on a level below them. If you find something by this artist that you don’t like, you won’t trust your gut and admit to yourself you don’t like it. Instead, you’ll put yourself down, assuming the problem is all on your end. And maybe you’ll start putting other people down if they don’t “appreciate” it.
Art isn’t about being “great” or whatever. There isn’t some definitive scale of artists with the biggest and best at the top. It’s not some big race or chess game, with new grand masters coming to knock old contenders off their pedestal.
Making art is an achievement, but not in that way.