Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Define Young Geniuses

Please define with your own words. (Not by a textual source)

4 comments:

  1. A Young Genius is someone within the art world that creates the height of their most inventive work early on in their careers. It is often hard for them to attain success during their later years. They just cannot topple the prestige of their original idea. An example of an artist that exemplifies this includes Jean-Hanore Fragonard and his reliance on the Rococo style.

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  2. An upstart often at odds with the elders of his field. He does not follow the code of the elderly artists of his time, and they in turn do not respect him. Often controversial, he is celebratedfor his work, and often uses the controversy surrounding it to increase his reknown. Attracting others to his style, the young genius will ironically often become the stuffy old master in the end.

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  3. Interesting idea, that of the young genius, given our reading from D. Galenson. I would pose the question to the group regarding the term "young" -- does this mean, necessarily young in age? I don't believe that it has to be defined with that frame of reference. Young in terms of one's career -- and often that correlates with one's age. From "Freakonomics" we know the difficulty of correlation, though, right?

    I would state that I have more trouble with defining "genius". A glimpse at the MacArthur Genius Grants later in the semester will help with that.

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  4. I forgot to mention this in our class:
    The MacArthur foundation offers "genius grants" out of the blue to professionals in many fields. There are criteria for receiving the grants (see link below). The beauty of this program is that one cannot apply to receive the grant. It is bestowed upon you. To me, that is an important (though often not realized) criteria of a genius) -- humility, in the sense of not tooting one's own horn or bragging about one's self.

    http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.959463/k.9D7D/Fellows_Program.htm

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