Thought Shrapnel

This essay which mixes philosophical reflections, a new word, and popular culture is like catnip for me. In it, W. David Marx argues that we’ve essentially redefined what a “genius” means.

Instead of the lone artist starving in the garret, geniuses these days are those like Taylor Swift who fuse art and business for (huge) commercial success. As Marx argues in his conclusion “the designation of certain people as geniuses has long-term consequences” as it affects future behaviour. Without people doing things differently then, as he quotes John D. Graham as saying, “all the cultural activities of humanity would soon degenerate into clichés.”

Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky built his theory of art around the idea of ostranie — artworks that “defamiliarize” the familiar. In his book The Prison-House of Language, Frederic Jameson explains that ostranie-based art is “a way of restoring conscious experience, of breaking through deadening and mechanical habits of conduct.” And even when art fails to achieve full mind-shifts, its strangeness can at least be a source of new stimuli. Avant-garde artists in the 20th century believed art should always be a curveball; a fastball is not art.

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In this, Swift offers us something new: She’s an anti-Kantian genius. Her work is always “direct” and “relatable” — no curveballs, no ostranie. Her constant deployment of existing conventions is not an artistic failure, but a brilliant artistic statement of audience expectation management. Burt lauds Swift for her “deep attachment to the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge conventions of modern songwriting.” This is true: Swift is quite dedicated to specific patterns from recent hits. Many, many musical artists have used the I V vi IV chord progression: Better than Ezra’s “Good,” Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” and Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” Maybe some of these artists even wrote one additional song repeating the same chord pattern. Swift, in her dedication, has actively chosen to deploy the same recognizable chord sequence 21 times. (And she’s used the alternatively famous IV I V vi and vi IV I V progressions at least 9 times each.)

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Swift’s genius status also demonstrates how little tension remains between art and business. In my new book Blank Space, I discuss the rise of what I call entrepreneurial heroism: “the glorification of business savvy as equivalent to artistic genius.” Avant-garde artists never made billions, because ostranie is a bad strategy for securing extraordinary profit or maximizing shareholder value. But when genius is simply “clever deployment of the thing everyone already wants,” there is no longer an inherent conflict with business logic.

Source: Culture: An Owner’s Manual

Image: Rosa Rafael