Deadly Genius and the Back-To-Zero Problem
<p>There are entire genres of art that have self-destructed in the last<br />
hundred years &mdash; become drained of vitality, driven their audiences<br />
away to the point where they become nothing more than museum exhibits<br />
or hobby-horses for snobs and antiquarians.</p>
<p>The three most obvious examples are painting, the literary novel<br />
and classical music.  After about 1910 all three of these art forms<br />
determinedly severed the connections with popular culture that had<br />
made them relevant over the previous 250 years. Their departure left<br />
vacuums to be filled; we got modern genre literature, rock music, and<br />
art photography.</p>
<p>Other art forms underwent near-death experiences and survived only<br />
in severely compromised forms.  Jazz, running away from its roots in<br />
honky tonks and dance halls, all but strangled on its own<br />
sophistication between 1960 and 1980; it survives today primarily as<br />
smoothed-out elevator music.  Sculpture, having spent a century losing<br />
itself in increasingly meaningless abstraction, is only now feeling<br />
its way back towards a figurative vocabulary; the most interesting<br />
action there is not yet in the revival of mimetic forms but in artists<br />
who speak the vocabulary of mathematics and machine technology.</p>
<p>What makes an art-form self-destruct like this?  Many things can<br />
contribute &mdash; hankerings for bourgeois respectibility, corruption<br />
by politics, clumsy response to a competing genre.  But the one we<br />
see over and over again is deadly genius.</p>
<p>A deadly genius is a talent so impressive that he can break and<br />
remake all the rules of the form, and seduce others into trying to<br />
emulate his disruptive brilliance &mdash; even when those followers<br />
lack the raw ability or grounding to make art in the new idiom the the<br />
genius has defined.</p>
<p>Arnold Schoenberg (classical music).  James Joyce (literary<br />
novels).  John Coltrane (jazz).  Pablo Picasso (painting). Konstantin<br />
Brancusi (sculpture).  These men had the knack of inventing radical<br />
new forms that made the preexisting conventions of their arts seem<br />
stale and outworn.  They produced works of brilliance, taught their<br />
followers to value disruptive brillance over tradition, and in doing so<br />
all but destroyed their arts.</p>
<p>Artistic tradition can be limiting sometimes, but it has one thing<br />
going for it &mdash; it is the result of selection for pleasing an audience.<br />
Thus, artists of moderate talent can imitate it and produce something that<br />
the eye, ear, heart and mind will experience with pleasure.  Most artists<br />
are at best of moderate talent; thus, this kind of imitation is how<br />
art forms survive and keep an audience.</p>
<p>On the other hand&#8230;imitation Schoenberg or Coltrane is<br />
unlistenably bad.  Imitation Joyce is unreadable.  Imitation Picasso<br />
looks like a toddler&#8217;s daubings and imitation Brancusi is ugly junk.<br />
Worse still is when mediocre artists strain themselves to be the next<br />
disruptive genius. And perhaps worst of all is what happens when bad<br />
artists turn disruption into cliche.</p>
<p>Art forms self-destruct when enough of their establishment follows<br />
a deadly genius off a cliff.  And we had a bad streak of this sort of<br />
thing just about a century ago; three of the four deadly geniuses I&#8217;ve<br />
named above flourished at that time.  Why then?</p>
<p>Tom Wolfe argued in <cite>From Bauhaus to Our House</cite> that the<br />
breakdown of the traditional patronage system in the late 19th century<br />
had a lot to do with the degenerative changes in modern art.  Wolfe never<br />
identified deadly genius as a core problem. but his argument readily<br />
extends to an explanation of why deadly genius become so much deadlier<br />
at that time.</p>
<p>Wealthy aristocratic patrons, had, in general, little use for<br />
disruptive brilliance &mdash; what they wanted from artists was<br />
impressive display objects, status symbols that had to be<br />
comprehensible to the patron&#8217;s peers.  Thus, artists learned to<br />
stay more or less within traditional forms or starve.  Evolution<br />
happened, but it was relatively gradual and unsconscious.  Geniuses<br />
were not permitted to become deadly.</p>
<p>After 1900 all this changed.  Wolfe elucidates some of the complex<br />
reasons that artists found themselves with more freedom and less<br />
security than ever before.  In an increasingly bourgeois climate, the<br />
cry went up that artistic creation must become autonomous, heeding its<br />
own internal imperatives as much as (or more than) the demands of any<br />
audience. The breakneck pace of technological change helped reinforce a<br />
sense that possibilities were limitless and all rules could be<br />
discarded.</p>
<p>In the new environment, artistic tradition lost much of its normative<br />
force.  &#8220;Back to zero!&#8221; was the slogan; forget everything so you can invent<br />
anything. And when the next wave of deadly geniuses hit, there was nothing<br />
to moderate them any more.</p>
<p>It is unlikely that anything quite like the Modernist disruption will<br />
ever happen again, if only because we&#8217;ve been there and done that now.  But<br />
as we try to heal all the fractures it produced, this one lesson is worth<br />
bearing in mind.  Genius can be deadly when it goes where mere talent<br />
cannot follow.</p>
