Genius
Over centuries people built up lore: this was how you did something. You made a fire, a pot, a devotional altar, a statue, a shawl, or pair of moccasins. Lore was hard won. Initially, a god might have helped out and clued people in about how something was done but the incremental growth in awareness was part of the human struggle and part of human achievement.
Lore became tradition and was passed on. Traditions remained the same yet changed. Peoples met other peoples who did things differently. Individuals emerged who had a different idea about how to do something. Materials that went into pots or paints might change as tribes migrated. New notions swam into human heads. For a long time representations of Jesus pleased Christians. Then they stopped pleasing certain Christians.
Tradition blessed art. It said that art made sense and could be trusted. After all, human beings had created the traditions. To go to work in a master’s studio or atelier or workshop and make paintings or pots was to join a heritage that might link hands over decades, generations, and centuries. Such an endeavor secured people—to learn this you went there. The degree to which people considered each object a craft or an art was irrelevant, so much categorical fluff. What mattered was the blessing.
The coming of industrial machines changed the role of lore. The machines could make the moccasins. They could make matches to start fires. They could make pots. There wasn’t much they couldn’t make. The relation between peoples’ hands and spirits changed. The human enterprise of slowly making something came to seem beside the point. Craft became a hobby. Art became a status symbol, as in “Look we have money and works of art adorn our walls,” or an anti-status symbol, something willfully individualistic, something utterly outside of tradition.
Machines are indifferent to traditions. They can be made to make the same things or they can be made to make different things. If different things are made then they can be sold as something new and that novelty has value. The paths of human design are infinite but the value that tradition bestowed, as it was vested in the tribulations and triumphs of lore, paled. Worth came to seem to reside in money but money is always a superficial value. To try to make it more than that is to ascribe to money a power it does not have. When newspapers record how much a painting sold for at an auction that fact has to do with the annals of social prestige not the annals of art.
With the coming of the Romantics, art came to seek its blessing in genius. Genius proclaimed the inner worth of human beings. Genius was god-like in a world that largely had abjured gods. Genius was unpredictable yet over time it made sense. For a world that increasingly paid attention to the doings of celebrities, genius had magical backbone. As traditions ossified and became encrusted with social perquisites, genius spoke for genuineness. As individuals shed their tribal identities and became members of nation states, genius offered their mass isolation a forcible inspiration.
When the Nazis denounced modern art as decadent, they wanted to reassert the values of the tribe. Their tribe, however, was a figment of imagination. To create a tribe was nothing more than toxic racial propaganda. The willfulness of this action testified to hysteria. The Nazis felt they had lost something that never had existed in the first place. Anyone who doubts the power of imagination in human affairs need only look further than the demented era of the Third Reich. The lore the Nazis invoked was racial hatred dressed up in pseudo-science.
The enormous paradox that faced the modern artist—and the same one that faced a Nazi “cinematic genius” such as Leni Riefenstahl or, for that matter, Hitler, who worked as an artist as a young man—was to create lore. Lore possessed the depth that human beings craved. It wasn’t arbitrary. It spoke to the deep connections that living on earth fostered. It spoke to the particular talents of human beings. Genius enacted the moment of insight that lay behind lore. To praise genius was to praise something life-giving and generous.
Among the dangers that accompanied the afflatus of artistic genius was the absence of authority. The genius proclaimed his or her authority. (Gertrude Stein was a good example of this modern genius.) There was no blessing for genius. It came into the world naked and possessed of equivocal power. How could such power be verified? Picasso was celebrated by the likes of Life magazine (“Genius at work and at play”) but did that mean that each generation would toss up a certain number of geniuses? Would geniuses appear each year like new model cars? What standards were to be used to assess genius? And as the times changed, would the paths of genius change, too? Genius presented a perplexing situation that remains perplexing. To center value in genius is to invite both surfeit and nothingness.
To pine for some putative tradition is to indulge nostalgia. To proclaim endless genius is to indulge conceit. Though the temptation is understandable, idolizing genius is wrongheaded. In this regard Andy Warhol is cautionary. At The Factory, as the name indicated, he could be a machine of sorts but also a genius of sorts. Wasn’t that the essence of modernity? To pretend the machines didn’t exist was a lie. To push aside genius was to flaunt a false modesty. Warhol’s message was that there need be no ordeal, which was the opposite of the ancient message where an ordeal offered the chance for vision. Warhol was an ironist who raised the profile of banality. His genius spoke in a monotone. The cult that led Germans to acclaim Hitler as a savior had desperately higher stakes. Hitler understood that acclaimed genius is a rule unto itself, free to offer a dispensation without boundaries and to indulge any animus.
This essay is an exciting nightmare, to be sure.