probablyasocialecologist:

Whether genius is partly genetic is hard to say; intelligence has a hereditary component, but its link to genius is hazy, as Hans Eysenck pointed out in his book, Intelligence: A New Look. “There is no case of a genius having a genius father—the best we can do is Mozart, whose father was a reasonably good musician, and Bach, who had several musically gifted relatives in his family, none of genius rank,” he wrote. “For the great majority, father and mother were ordinary folk, without any special gifts or achievements…” Moreover, these parents very rarely provided the sort of promising environments one might expect future geniuses to require. Genius seems to strike without warning.

Earlier this year, 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.” As a theater director, Sharon writes, “my work consists entirely of creating the conditions for genius to flow.” He defines genius as “the oxygen that those in a shared space breathe in and are transformed by; it allows them to reach their full potential. In this way, ‘genius’ returns to its original Latin meaning of an ‘attendant spirit.’”

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. “The ‘G word’ is often used to shut down conversation or inquiry into a particular artist, into his or her community and connection to others,” Iyer says. “No music happens in a vacuum. Anybody who has the privilege of making music for others got there through the help of others. Even real singular talents, and I’ve known many, are nurtured and brought into a community. So I always try to understand the term relationally, understand artists in the historical, social, and political context in which they were living and working.”

Both Sharon and Iyer echo the work of Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. “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,” he wrote in his 2015 book, The Systems Model of Creativity. He suggests that genius, as a noun, has always been a sort of illusion. “In popular usage, ‘genius’ is sometimes used as a noun that stands by itself, yet in reality it appears always with a modifier: musical genius, mathematical genius, scientific genius, and so forth,” he wrote. “Genius cannot show itself except when garbed in a concrete symbolic form.”