Author – Olga Glasson<\/p>\n
There is an old and abiding notion in Western culture that you cannot have great art without suffering, a belief that has held sway for centuries. The life stories of Vincent van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Edvard Munch, Frida Kahlo and many more have done much to cement the idea of the tormented genius, one whose psychological anguish is the wellspring of his or her creative power.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But as psychology, neuroscience and cultural studies have advanced, they point to a reality that is not so straightforward. It is into this wider discourse that Kateryna Mariien steps with her new book, The Madness of Great Artists: Genius, Sensitivity, and the Transformation of Pain, bringing something of an unexpected angle to the subject.<\/p>\n
Kateryn Mariien does not put forward the usual line of inquiry as to whether mental illness begets artistic talent. Her question is altogether different: what if it is not the source at all? In her view, pain, isolation or emotional intensity do not in themselves make for art. They require to be worked over by discipline, memory, symbolic thought and the imagination before they can be said to have meaning. It is this transformation of experience that yields artistic achievement.<\/p>\n
It is a subtle change of emphasis but it alters the terms of the debate. For years the public has been content to let dramatic biographies and psychological diagnoses define creativity.\u00a0 Kateryn Mariien will have none of it; she is not interested in reducing an artist to his or her ailments. What she looks at are the cognitive processes that turn personal history into something of universal import.<\/p>\n
The result is a conceptual framework where transformation, not pathology, is the central feature of the creative act. The book\u2019s interdisciplinary make up is one of its strengths. Mrs. Mariien draws on philosophy, art history and the biographies of artists as well as hard science from the fields of psychology and neuroscience. This is in keeping with a trend in modern scholarship to synthesize across disciplines when dealing with complex cultural matters.<\/p>\n
In some ways the book is most original in how it dispenses with one of the West\u2019s oldest romantic fables. You will not find the familiar equation of suffering equaling genius here. Mrs. Mariien offers a more measured formula: experience leads to transformation which in turn produces the work. Emotional pain is neither a given nor a requirement; rather, it is the individual\u2019s skill in reorganizing that pain into narratives and images that can speak to others.<\/p>\n
This has ramifications for more than just art historians; there is relevance for educators and those in the field of cultural theory as well. And while one could be forgiven for wanting to romanticize the \u201cmad genius,\u201d Mrs. Mariien resists the urge. To do so would be to oversimplify the lives of artists and the nature of their work. She makes the case that we should see genius as an active intellectual endeavor, not some passive fallout of instability.
\nFor anyone with an interest in the crossroads of art and neuroscience, The Madness of Great Artists is more than a compendium of biographies. It puts forth a coherent way of thinking about human transformation as opposed to human pathology. Whether it will set the tone for academic talk in the years ahead is another matter. But in questioning an assumption that has been with us for so long, the book has already put an important debate in a new light.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Author – Olga Glasson There is an old and abiding notion in Western culture that you cannot have great art without suffering, a belief that has held sway for centuries. The life stories of Vincent van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Edvard Munch, Frida Kahlo and many more have done much to cement the idea of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":58869,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cutinsight.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cutinsight.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cutinsight.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cutinsight.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cutinsight.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58868"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.cutinsight.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58874,"href":"https:\/\/www.cutinsight.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58868\/revisions\/58874"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cutinsight.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cutinsight.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cutinsight.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cutinsight.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}