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