{"id":157,"date":"2004-09-24T10:46:43","date_gmt":"2004-09-24T15:46:43","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=157"},"modified":"2004-09-24T10:46:43","modified_gmt":"2004-09-24T15:46:43","slug":"deadly-genius-and-the-back-to-zero-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=157","title":{"rendered":"Deadly Genius and the Back-To-Zero Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There are entire genres of art that have self-destructed in the last<br \/>\nhundred years &mdash; become drained of vitality, driven their audiences<br \/>\naway to the point where they become nothing more than museum exhibits<br \/>\nor hobby-horses for snobs and antiquarians.<\/p>\n<p>The three most obvious examples are painting, the literary novel<br \/>\nand classical music.  After about 1910 all three of these art forms<br \/>\ndeterminedly severed the connections with popular culture that had<br \/>\nmade them relevant over the previous 250 years. Their departure left<br \/>\nvacuums to be filled; we got modern genre literature, rock music, and<br \/>\nart photography.<\/p>\n<p>Other art forms underwent near-death experiences and survived only<br \/>\nin severely compromised forms.  Jazz, running away from its roots in<br \/>\nhonky tonks and dance halls, all but strangled on its own<br \/>\nsophistication between 1960 and 1980; it survives today primarily as<br \/>\nsmoothed-out elevator music.  Sculpture, having spent a century losing<br \/>\nitself in increasingly meaningless abstraction, is only now feeling<br \/>\nits way back towards a figurative vocabulary; the most interesting<br \/>\naction there is not yet in the revival of mimetic forms but in artists<br \/>\nwho speak the vocabulary of mathematics and machine technology.<\/p>\n<p>What makes an art-form self-destruct like this?  Many things can<br \/>\ncontribute &mdash; hankerings for bourgeois respectibility, corruption<br \/>\nby politics, clumsy response to a competing genre.  But the one we<br \/>\nsee over and over again is deadly genius.<\/p>\n<p>A deadly genius is a talent so impressive that he can break and<br \/>\nremake all the rules of the form, and seduce others into trying to<br \/>\nemulate his disruptive brilliance &mdash; even when those followers<br \/>\nlack the raw ability or grounding to make art in the new idiom the the<br \/>\ngenius has defined.<\/p>\n<p>Arnold Schoenberg (classical music).  James Joyce (literary<br \/>\nnovels).  John Coltrane (jazz).  Pablo Picasso (painting). Konstantin<br \/>\nBrancusi (sculpture).  These men had the knack of inventing radical<br \/>\nnew forms that made the preexisting conventions of their arts seem<br \/>\nstale and outworn.  They produced works of brilliance, taught their<br \/>\nfollowers to value disruptive brillance over tradition, and in doing so<br \/>\nall but destroyed their arts.<\/p>\n<p>Artistic tradition can be limiting sometimes, but it has one thing<br \/>\ngoing for it &mdash; it is the result of selection for pleasing an audience.<br \/>\nThus, artists of moderate talent can imitate it and produce something that<br \/>\nthe eye, ear, heart and mind will experience with pleasure.  Most artists<br \/>\nare at best of moderate talent; thus, this kind of imitation is how<br \/>\nart forms survive and keep an audience.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand&#8230;imitation Schoenberg or Coltrane is<br \/>\nunlistenably bad.  Imitation Joyce is unreadable.  Imitation Picasso<br \/>\nlooks like a toddler&#8217;s daubings and imitation Brancusi is ugly junk.<br \/>\nWorse still is when mediocre artists strain themselves to be the next<br \/>\ndisruptive genius. And perhaps worst of all is what happens when bad<br \/>\nartists turn disruption into cliche.<\/p>\n<p>Art forms self-destruct when enough of their establishment follows<br \/>\na deadly genius off a cliff.  And we had a bad streak of this sort of<br \/>\nthing just about a century ago; three of the four deadly geniuses I&#8217;ve<br \/>\nnamed above flourished at that time.  Why then?<\/p>\n<p>Tom Wolfe argued in <cite>From Bauhaus to Our House<\/cite> that the<br \/>\nbreakdown of the traditional patronage system in the late 19th century<br \/>\nhad a lot to do with the degenerative changes in modern art.  Wolfe never<br \/>\nidentified deadly genius as a core problem. but his argument readily<br \/>\nextends to an explanation of why deadly genius become so much deadlier<br \/>\nat that time.<\/p>\n<p>Wealthy aristocratic patrons, had, in general, little use for<br \/>\ndisruptive brilliance &mdash; what they wanted from artists was<br \/>\nimpressive display objects, status symbols that had to be<br \/>\ncomprehensible to the patron&#8217;s peers.  Thus, artists learned to<br \/>\nstay more or less within traditional forms or starve.  Evolution<br \/>\nhappened, but it was relatively gradual and unsconscious.  Geniuses<br \/>\nwere not permitted to become deadly.<\/p>\n<p>After 1900 all this changed.  Wolfe elucidates some of the complex<br \/>\nreasons that artists found themselves with more freedom and less<br \/>\nsecurity than ever before.  In an increasingly bourgeois climate, the<br \/>\ncry went up that artistic creation must become autonomous, heeding its<br \/>\nown internal imperatives as much as (or more than) the demands of any<br \/>\naudience. The breakneck pace of technological change helped reinforce a<br \/>\nsense that possibilities were limitless and all rules could be<br \/>\ndiscarded.<\/p>\n<p>In the new environment, artistic tradition lost much of its normative<br \/>\nforce.  &#8220;Back to zero!&#8221; was the slogan; forget everything so you can invent<br \/>\nanything. And when the next wave of deadly geniuses hit, there was nothing<br \/>\nto moderate them any more.<\/p>\n<p>It is unlikely that anything quite like the Modernist disruption will<br \/>\never happen again, if only because we&#8217;ve been there and done that now.  But<br \/>\nas we try to heal all the fractures it produced, this one lesson is worth<br \/>\nbearing in mind.  Genius can be deadly when it goes where mere talent<br \/>\ncannot follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are entire genres of art that have self-destructed in the last hundred years &mdash; become drained of vitality, driven their audiences away to the point where they become nothing more than museum exhibits or hobby-horses for snobs and antiquarians. The three most obvious examples are painting, the literary novel and classical music. After about&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=157\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Deadly Genius and the Back-To-Zero Problem<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}