Genius creatives are still alive

While notions of the artist as creative genius have their seeds in the Renaissance, they did not come into their own until the 18th century when the idea of artistic genius began to be articulated in relation to the specific personality traits of ‘great’ artists and their ‘inspired’ works. As Paul Kristeller noted:

for the first time, the term “creative” was applied not only to God but also to the human artist, and a whole new vocabulary was developed to characterise the artist and his activity although there were some partial or scattered precedents to be found in ancient and Renaissance thought. The artist was guided no longer by reason or by rules but by feeling and sentiment, intuition and imagination; he produced what was novel and original. And at the point of his highest achievement he was a genius (1990: 250).

Perhaps the most influential Enlightenment definition of genius is in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which presents genius as the ‘mental aptitude’ necessary for the production of fine art, a capacity characterised by originality, and opposed to imitation. This view dominated a particular strand of the Romantic sensibility (especially the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge), and is arguably still a strong presence in popular notions of creativity, as well as in what we call a ‘traditionalist’ academic view.

While some commentators in contemporary discussions of creativity remain implicitly attached to the idea that some people are more creative than others, few educators now wish to promote models of singular creative genius. The sociological critique of Kant proposed by Pierre Bourdieu (1984) opposes Kant’s view that a refined cultural sensibility was a universal property, arguing instead that it is the restricted taste of a particular (bourgeois) social class.

This critique offers a democratic view of popular cultural taste and, by implication, of the capacity for artistic production. In this section, we look at what a modern version of the belief in artistic genius might make of creativity and raise the question: to what extent is ‘creative practice’ a modern debasement of ‘real’ artistic endeavour on the part of lone artists? One who does propose this view, the conservative, neo-Kantian philosopher Roger Scruton, begins by expressing his fear and dislike of more democratic versions of creativity.