[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

[bryant]

Eric Raymond flips allll the way over into the cult of tradition with a resounding thud:

"A deadly genius is a talent so impressive that he can break and remake all the rules of the form, and seduce others into trying to emulate his disruptive brilliance -- even when those followers lack the raw ability or grounding to make art in the new idiom the the genius has defined."

He then goes on to explain that Picasso, Coltrane, Joyce, Schoenberg, and Brancusi killed their respective fields by being so brilliant. For bonus points, he posits that the problem was caused by the death of the patronage system. You see, once artists were permitted to do whatever they liked, some of them produced deadly work.

The former sentence is not an exaggeration. The exact quote: "Geniuses were not permitted to become deadly." I.e., geniuses were not allowed to break and remake all the rules of the form. And, in Eric Raymond's eyes, this was a good thing.

This obsession with safety over risk is really getting out of hand.

Comments

Touch of Death!

[wordwolf.livejournal.com]

I'd never heard of Eric Raymond before reading this quotation, but it's certainly thought-provoking. On a day when I need to be provoked. I don't know anything about his background or politics. But my instant rejoinders would be:

1. All genius is deadly. Whether in theoretical physics or in art, the most consistent form of advance seems to be some kind of punctuated equilibrium. It's a beautiful and necessary thing. Geniuses sweep away their precursors (as Harold Bloom continues to hammer), and move things along, and then get swept away by their successors. Nothing has ever been brought to a standstill by this process, except fields that needed to be killed or replaced, like alchemy and antiquarianism.

2. Patronage has been essential to this process, because it's the masses, or more recently the consumers, who get the most cross when geniuses break and remake their forms. The masses only appreciate genius in hindsight, which is why modern patronage (arts and blue-sky science endowments) are so essential.

3. The only way to remind ourselves of this is to try to simulate past response to innovation. Not so hard in the sciences, but in the arts, this requires immersion and some careful forgetting. The example one of my profs used was, "Read mediocre mid-eighteenth-century poetry solidly for a week, and then read 'Kubla Khan.'"

Thanks as always for sharing interesting bits!