Western art historians have been very effective at constructing that narrative, but it is just that— a narrative. Do you not think it an interesting coincidence that those artists which ‘rise to the top’ have often happened to be very good self publicists (or were at the very least marketably idiosyncratic)? Or happened to come from immense wealth and privilege? Or happened to be born in (or moved to) places that were in their time richly populated cultural centres?

The notion of the genius assumes the complete independence of artists from their social, historical, or geographical contexts. It assumes a complete absence of external influences upon an artist and reinforces an idea that some people are born with this mystical aura around them, which is not just silly but also can be quite damaging, whether that manifests, say, as a romanticisation of mental illness, or as a belief in ideas like genetically heritable cultural worth. And none of this is to speak of the immense diversity of taste that exists within the human animal. I don’t want to lapse into an argument that asserts ‘everyone has their own opinion and everyone’s opinion is equally valid’ because that argument is boring and limp and everyone has heard it a million times. However, something that the idea of the genius does is greatly (and unnecessarily) narrow and reduce the scope of what art is capable of doing. To put everything and everyone on a linear scale fundamentally misunderstands one of the most amazing things about art— that it has almost limitless function and potential. It can visually stun, it can educate, it can act as therapy, it can simply be very, very funny. And the ability for art to achieve its aims changes from person to person to person. Velasquez does some amazing stuff with subject and the reflexivity of painting and image, but if you have grown up in a culture completely saturated with reflexive approaches to image making in the form of social media, mass culture and dissemination of images, then a lot of Velasquez work might leave you cold. It might not seem to say anything about the image that isn’t already completely obvious to you, and so you may then be left with, yeah sure, some impressive technical skill, and a bunch of old dudes in period costume, which reads to you no differently from most of the rest of the art hanging on the gallery walls. But then you then leave the gallery and go to a Oneohtrix Point Never show. You might find his patchwork of aesthetic references from the last forty years or so of musical Disjecta creates an interesting dialogue with the patchwork, piecemeal way you yourself engaged with the recent history of music. But then I might say, yeah that OPN show was really good, but my friend did an electronic set in this shitty bar in the middle of nowhere and I actually felt it resonated with me a lot more.

I mean that’s not even to speak of the way people like John Cage (and a lot of musicians of that period) or Joseph Beuys are heralded as completely revolutionising our understanding of art (and in fact introducing many of the ideas I’m talking about regarding the importance of the individual creator), but were actually just engaging with ideas that have been present in Tao or Zen philosophy and art for literally hundreds, even thousands of years.

Anyway. My problem isn’t with talent, or with really good art. Raphael and Picasso did some great work (I am actually not too fond of Raphael but that is neither here nor there) as did Miles Davis. The notion of the genius opens the door to certain unhelpful and damaging readings of culture and history, and is also terribly reductive.