Is genius an attribute or a ‘circumstance’?

[T]he notion of genius as a capability a person can possess has come under attack recently in several ways. Megan Garber, writing in The Atlantic, criticized the excuses of bad behavior that so-called geniuses—specifically men—enjoy.

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Yuval Sharon, artistic director of The Industry in Los Angeles, whose experimental operas have won widespread acclaim, shared his anxiety about winning a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, notoriously called the “Genius Grant.” In an essay titled “Genius as Circumstance” in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sharon writes, “Moments, ideas, a single poem in a collection—a work of genius, no matter how individually wrought—is never the product of a single individual. We should stop thinking of genius as an attribute and instead start to think of it as a condition, a circumstance.”

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Jazz artist Vijay Iyer, another MacArthur fellow, is also uncomfortable with the conventional meaning of genius. In a Nautilus interview with Kevin Berger, Iyer says the label “genius” narrows our understanding of art and artists, and by extension, science and scientists.

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“The location of genius is not in any particular individual’s mind, but in a virtual space, or system, where an individual interacts with a cultural domain and with a social field,” [psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi] wrote in his 2015 book, The Systems Model of Creativity. He suggests that genius, as a noun, has always been a sort of illusion.

Read full, original post: The Case Against Geniuses