Genius critics

Artists never accepted the attribution of genius as readily as theorists and bourgeois admirers applied it. Artists knew too much about the recalcitrantly physical qualities of words, paint, stone, ink, and sounds for that. Artists are as interested in technique as in inspirations.

But for Kant genius was the criterion of artistic value, and from the beginning, the genius of the artist had to be matched by the genius of the observer and critic. How, after all, could the work of genius be known? Only if it provided “to pleasure and contemplation an inexhaustible object of lingering attention and interpretation” (Gadamer).

In fact, the observer’s role is even greater: Object, Gadamer notes, are normally judged complete with reference to some purpose or end. A chair is finished if it has enough legs to hold a sitter, and if it provides comfort. But art, on modern aesthetic assumptions, is defined by the fact that it has no end outside itself. But this means it has no criterion of purpose by which to judge whether it is completed. Paul Valery thought that the mark of a work of art was precisely its state of incompletion.

Gadamer says that “it follows that it must be left to the recipient to make something of a work.” And from this it follows that “one way of understanding a work . . . is no less legitimate than another. There is no criterion of appropriate reaction. Not only does the artist himself possess none – the aesthetics of genius would agree here; every encounter with the work has the rank and rights of a new production.” The art object thus disintegrates into the experience of the art object, nd this leads to what Gadamer calls “an untenable hermeneutic nihilism.”

It seems that romantic genius collapses into postmodern critical anarchy. But the story is not quite a story of collapse, since the chaos has only barely been contained at the beginning.