The Romantic auteur-visionary artist

[Slothrop]

thanks so much for the post ripley, really interesting, and some great tips! definitely going to follow some of them up

Yeah, totally, this is just the sort of stuff I was after.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Burial's 'genius' can be deconstructed to a great extent, if we want to be analytical about it... the textures and melodies resonate with a (often unexpressed) sentiment and emotion shared by a large group of people living in our society at this time, while also in a broader sense communicating feelings which a great number of people have experienced, whether in the primary societal context he resonates with or not. he appealed to people on emotional, intelectual and obsessive/'cult' levels - is his 'genius', as posited in any objective sense, not broad appeal?

I don't just think he's great because I like him - it's because I like him a lot. Appeal can have different intensities.

 

[elgato]

I don't just think he's great because I like him - it's because I like him a lot. Appeal can have different intensities.

yeh i agree. but there lies the inherent subjectivity of the issue, and it always seems to me that the term genius is used in common currency to imply something which reaches further than that.

 

[Gavin]

however, this scholarship has not focused so much on the *reception* of these concepts, or the way they resonate so powerfully with man people, as they have on the creation or the reinforcement of them. I think a lot of work has yet to be done on why it is people find the attractive. at the very least I would expect that to differ across different cultures (i.e. ones that don't have a Romantic period might feel differently), but it hasn't really been explored much.

Related to Western bourgeois conception of the individual perhaps? The "genius myth" is a major pillar of holding up the idea of the autonomous subject removed from history, economy, culture, etc. The nature of the posts in this thread seem to support it: those who want to ascribe superior artistic work to effort, privilege, education, position, and those who want to rely on a more nebulous mystical inner well of inspiration and creativity apart from external factors...

"Genius" goes back before Romanticism, but it's Romanticism where it takes on the tenor of individual struggling against crippling society, which I understand as a kind of anxiety surrounding the social shakeups of the industrial revolution. Michelangelo was considered a genius in his lifetime, but worked on specific commissions from the most powerful people Europe, and no one thought of it as a compromise. Few artists of the Middle Ages are even known because superior skill was the result of God (and for His glory), not the individual artist.

 

[ripley]

Related to Western bourgeois conception of the individual perhaps? The "genius myth" is a major pillar of holding up the idea of the autonomous subject removed from history, economy, culture, etc. The nature of the posts in this thread seem to support it: those who want to ascribe superior artistic work to effort, privilege, education, position, and those who want to rely on a more nebulous mystical inner well of inspiration and creativity apart from external factors...

oh absolutely. A lot of legal discussion focuses on how copyright law reinforces this - building in rewards for creativity based precisely on the points where you define yourself as an autonomous subject.

Also, there are interesting counter-arguments from the indigenous rights communities who are attempting to claim (and sometimes successfully claiming) ownership of cultural works as a community. Applying property claims to traditions. These are hugely problematic, especially because Western legal systems tend to assume and reproduce individualism in the name of 'equality before the law.'

I also kind of agree that discussing the meaning of "genius" is likely to get us nowhere, since either it's completely subjective on an individual level (people I like a lot), or subjective on a cultural level (people that a mass of people like a lot.. and that's where you end up with those "why are there so few female geniuses" discussions -shudder-)

 

[Slothrop]

"Genius" goes back before Romanticism, but it's Romanticism where it takes on the tenor of individual struggling against crippling society, which I understand as a kind of anxiety surrounding the social shakeups of the industrial revolution. Michelangelo was considered a genius in his lifetime, but worked on specific commissions from the most powerful people Europe, and no one thought of it as a compromise. Few artists of the Middle Ages are even known because superior skill was the result of God (and for His glory), not the individual artist.

Yeah, that's what I kind of suspected / had heard somewhere / had put together from bits and pieces of information but I hadn't found a unified discussion of it.

Did the idea of complete artistic control - not farming out the job of colouring the sky or filling out second violin parts or whatever because that would detract from the artistic integrity of the piece - follow the same sort of trajectory?

I guess another significant factor must have been the postion of the artist in society - in much the same way that dropping out requires you to be reasonably well off to start with. I know that artists like Durer and Velasquez and musicians like Mozart were unashamed about working to enhance their social standing because at that time artists commanded relatively little respect, and getting wealth and social status was a way of getting the importance of the artist taken seriously. It's only after artists actually have credibility that that it becomes possible to ask whether chasing money and success is detrimental to it.

And when did people start to question this sort of ideal? It certainly seems to be to some extent present in mid-twentieth century European avante-garde stuff (Adorno afaict, serialism etc) that I'm familiar with, and then gets pretty much completely rejected by Cage and Young and people. Objets trouves appear to be a resignation of control, but on the other hand, surrealism seems to be very much about the artist expressing themself in as unmediated a way as possible. Obviously there have always been functional, pragmatic, craft-minded people working in less high culture, and at some point critics started to view 'lower' forms (and thus the people who created them) as great artists despite their willingnes to make artistic compromises.

I'm thinking aloud here and extrapolating a lot, anyone more up on cultural history feel free to straigten me out...

 

[Corpsey]

I read a book called ''What Good are the Arts?'' by John Carey which featured a lot of issues in it that are directly relevant to this question. Essentially he looks at many of the classic arguments for the value of art (as he tries to determine if art/artistic work has any intrinsic value- moral, spiritual or otherwise) and dismisses them one by one as subjectively derived inventions that are made to masquerade as objectively quantifiable and verifiable truths. Think he looks at the romantic notion of 'genius' and scorns that too.

Personally I think the idea that great music/art cannot be produced with popular/commerical success in mind complete nonsense. I think producers should perhaps seek to be as individual and original as possible, so as to avoid contributing to artistic stagnation on a wider scale, but I wouldn't expect anybody to come up with some sort of completely unique and original type of music. Every great artist is the product of their influences... in fact one might argue that artistic genius ordinarily involves the inspired (or lucky) combining of various influences into a new form. Then there is also technical skill to think about, I suppose.

The subject of why some music resonates with millions of people and some music doesn't resonate with more than one person is presumably incredibly complicated. I started reading a book called ''This is your brain on music'' which promised to touch on issues like that, I should really read it.

 

[Chris]

As far as the whole Romantic cult of the individual, it wasn't as selfish as it might sound these days to lefty-intellectual types. It was in part an outgrowth of Rousseau's passionate individualism that emphasized choice, the chance to metaprogram yourself free from authority... which was a revolutionary concept meant for everyone. Kant's Idealism was also an influence, in his point that we can only understand life through our own ideas, because reality is ultimitely unknowable, so in the face of the ineffable we then engage with our own perceptions, and freely and reasonably make our own judgements. It wasn't all naval-gazing, some of it was an outgrowth of the more progressive intentions of the Enlightenment (a period I couldn't give two shit's about personally.. but find the themes and spirit of the Romantic era intoxicatingly on point).

As far as Genius, I don't know if I exactly like the word, but I do think that people are obviously gifted in different areas, tend to be more gauged towards different fields of understanding and skill, and I don't understand this need to deny that some people are just more naturally talented at some things... and have more curiosity, drive, desire, imagination, vision, etc... than others. I don't think there's any need to take offense because talent can't be resolved in the scheme of this levelling, antihuman, Socialist belief that NOBODY IS SPECIAL, THERE ARE NO GREAT THINKERS. I think scenius is one of the engines of cultural progress, but even these zones are ultimately moved forward by talents and tastemakers, and as for lone auteur artists, eccentrics, benign egomaniacs, etc; they play an important part too, and life would probably be a lot less interesting without them. Romantics themselves weren't actually antipopulist though, they valorized folk cultures, and today they'd perhaps champion any folk scenes that propagate counterintuitively (by folk I mean grass-roots, localized, scene-based movements). The values listed in the original post, to me, are more the sentiments of the worst kind of Rockists, ones with small imaginations and narrow tastes.*

Also, this idea of an artist that follows his/her own muse without regard to how people will receive it... well, popularity shouldn't be their primary concern if that means lowering their standards or being less inventive; but it's also hard to imagine their work being considered Great Art by anyone's subjective definition if it doesn't connect with anyone beyond the artist. But extremely personal art can be the most universal. And there's nothing wrong with a gifted artist pursuing their own ideas, it's actually very important. If you have a committee or PR team trying to whitewash the vision to make it dumbed-down and safe enough for an audience that they assume is stupid, well you get Post-Grunge or Mall-Emo or Walmart-Country (and thank God for artists that "know better" than what the masses think they want, take for instance this experiment where some dudes tried to make a song based on a survey of what The People said they want in music. Heh.). That doesn't mean that pop factories haven't churned out great, 'culturally important' art, but obviously there was a level of inspiration that managed to survive intact through the creative synergy of the production team/writers/vocal trainers/performers. And crucially, somewhere in there were great talents... gifted writers and producers and designers, who were the real artists in the process. Where does talent come from? Dunno. Is there something almost seemingly mystical about the creative process? Well, yeah, and trying to deconstruct it rationally seems pointless and utterly impossible. That's why Romantics prefered allusive, koan-like Fragments, or art or poetry to try to express their emotional reactions to the Sublime. I do too.

*edit: this wasn't meant as a dig against the poster but the ideas he was critiquing, hope it didn't come across that way...

 

[zhao]

this bit was inspiring for me:

David Foster Wallace once said "feeling that i am just another normal person has been the greatest asset to my writing... where as thinking that i'm a genius almost killed me."

 

[poetix]

"feeling that i am just another normal person has been the greatest asset to my writing... where as thinking that i'm a genius almost killed me."

The need to think of oneself as normal is not intrinsically more healthy than the need to think of oneself as a genius. Actually normal people would not have either need. And DFW was not altogether normal, and was unable to reconcile himself to the fact. Thinking of yourself as a genius is also failing to reconcile yourself to the fact that you're not altogether normal - if you're a transcendent superbeing, you're so far away from normal that your non-normality is just taken for granted, you've escaped normality's pull. The problem of people with highly unusual talents like DFW's is that they're freaks, not gods among men. The pattern for such people, uncomfortable with their own oddity, is to alternate between Olympian condescension and passionate denunciation (as "fascist", or whatever) and ridicule of any and every claim to be "different". But freaks occur, difference is what there is. Self-hatred doesn't help anyone.

 

[Tanadan]

Slothrop: A quite famous musicologist at Berkeley, Richard Taruskin, has made this one of his main hobby-horses - it almost pervades his quite recent (2005) and mammoth (five volume) Oxford History of Western Music. If you have access to Jstor or similiar, read his article 'The Poietic Fallacy', which summarizes his views, and argues that the genius-visionary trope originated not quite with the early "Romantics" (Beethoven, Friedrich, etc.) but with the more historically-minded generations (the "New German School" of Liszt, Wagner, etc but more importantly various historians and critics who surrounded them) that succeeded them and turned the early Romantics more into myths than artists. I generally agree with him (and his writing is amazingly enjoyable) but he's occasionally too polemical and comes to judgements too quickly, but, I mean, we all do. And sometimes he's just flat-out wrong - at the end of the article he slams Schoenberg's orchestral variations (which I love, and he says he likes other music by Arnold) just because they contain the B-A-C-H code... If you can't access it, I'll happily send a pdf.

 

[nomadthethird]

The need to think of oneself as normal is not intrinsically more healthy than the need to think of oneself as a genius. Actually normal people would not have either need. And DFW was not altogether normal, and was unable to reconcile himself to the fact. Thinking of yourself as a genius is also failing to reconcile yourself to the fact that you're not altogether normal - if you're a transcendent superbeing, you're so far away from normal that your non-normality is just taken for granted, you've escaped normality's pull. The problem of people with highly unusual talents like DFW's is that they're freaks, not gods among men. The pattern for such people, uncomfortable with their own oddity, is to alternate between Olympian condescension and passionate denunciation (as "fascist", or whatever) and ridicule of any and every claim to be "different". But freaks occur, difference is what there is. Self-hatred doesn't help anyone.

Trying to be "normal" killed Andy Warhol.

 

[nomadthethird]

I have a friend who insists that the "vampire" myth/legend was an outgrowth of conflicted feelings toward the Romantic visionary artist.

He says the Romantic visionary-artist had powers others couldn't understand, they stayed up all night burning midnight oil and leeched off society, sucking cultural blood out of everything to feed their endeavors.

Chronologically/historically, early vampire literature does coincide with nascent Romanticism.

 

[nomadthethird]

Bram Stoker's is later, though. 1897.

 

[zhao]

The need to think of oneself as normal is not intrinsically more healthy than the need to think of oneself as a genius. Actually normal people would not have either need. And DFW was not altogether normal, and was unable to reconcile himself to the fact. Thinking of yourself as a genius is also failing to reconcile yourself to the fact that you're not altogether normal - if you're a transcendent superbeing, you're so far away from normal that your non-normality is just taken for granted, you've escaped normality's pull. The problem of people with highly unusual talents like DFW's is that they're freaks, not gods among men. The pattern for such people, uncomfortable with their own oddity, is to alternate between Olympian condescension and passionate denunciation (as "fascist", or whatever) and ridicule of any and every claim to be "different". But freaks occur, difference is what there is. Self-hatred doesn't help anyone.

DFW suffered from intense anxiety from the pressures of being perceived as genius after getting the macarther grant... and i totally understand the relief of choosing to consider oneself not special. i mean whether one is "normal" or not, how one chooses to see oneself can have enormous consequences.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I have a friend who insists that the "vampire" myth/legend was an outgrowth of conflicted feelings toward the Romantic visionary artist.

He says the Romantic visionary-artist had powers others couldn't understand, they stayed up all night burning midnight oil and leeched off society, sucking cultural blood out of everything to feed their endeavors.

Chronologically/historically, early vampire literature does coincide with nascent Romanticism.

I'm sure there's that pyschological/mythical element to it as well, but I also heard about a hereditary form of anaemia (obv. much more likely in a very noble, i.e. inbred, family) that makes sufferers so pale that normal sunlight can burn them very quickly and that whatever meagre iron stores they manage to keep hold of are easily destroyed by compounds in garlic. Not too much of a leap of imagination to think that some sufferers who could get away with it might have drunk blood (animals, maybe) almost as a matter of survival. It seems almost too neat and tidy to be true, but I think I read in a reasonably serious journal or magazine of some kind. Depending on whether or not you consider New Scientist to be especially serious, possibly. Intriguing idea all the same.

 

[nomadthethird]

I'm sure there's that pyschological/mythical element to it as well, but I also heard about a hereditary form of anaemia (obv. much more likely in a very noble, i.e. inbred, family) that makes sufferers so pale that normal sunlight can burn them very quickly and that whatever meagre iron stores they manage to keep hold of are easily destroyed by compounds in garlic. Not too much of a leap of imagination to think that some sufferers who could get away with it might have drunk blood (animals, maybe) almost as a matter of survival. It seems almost too neat and tidy to be true, but I think I read in a reasonably serious journal or magazine of some kind. Depending on whether or not you consider New Scientist to be especially serious, possibly. Intriguing idea all the same.

Yeah I've heard, it's called "porphyria" isn't it? Or something like that. I've also heard people says vampires and werewolfs were the folk explanation for the work of serial murderers.

 

[nomadthethird]

DFW suffered from intense anxiety from the pressures of being perceived as genius after getting the macarther grant... and i totally understand the relief of choosing to consider oneself not special. i mean whether one is "normal" or not, how one chooses to see oneself can have enormous consequences.

Does anybody really think those MacArthur grants are given to geniuses and not handed out politically based on what good business connections the board members need to make on a given year? Or what's consideredly "politically" relevant by gliberals.

 

[nomadthethird]

http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/porphyria/porphyria.html

 

[nomadthethird]

Also, nobody who commits suicide does so because of a fucking MacArthur grant.

People who commit suicide do so because they've been suffering with serious mental illness for years, in DFW's case, a very intense and unrelenting anxiety disorder accompanied by major depression, one that did not respond well to treatment.

He did his best, I'm sure, but not everyone can win over biology through sheer force of will-to-normalcy.