Stereotypical Genius

Let’s start with some role-play. You are a writer for the Hollywood screen. You do not yet rely on AI to write 80% of your scripts. Your divorce was really expensive and the MegaStudio you write for thinks the world needs another stereotypical genius movie. Think Top Gun 2, but about creative geniuses, instead of fighter pilots. You’ve been asked to provide the following: a casting brief for your “stereotypical creative genius”. Who would play them? What do they look like? And how do they behave? This casting question tends to generate a response that looks like this:

And the story goes something like this:

Lone, white male demonstrates extraordinary ability at a very young age. WOWS with their brilliance at family holidays, to the hushed reaction of “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”. Before being discovered by some esteemed institution, that’s as rigid as they are renegade, they effortlessly discover something earth shattering, based on a sudden flash of inspiration. Which occurs in a messy lab or studio, that they live in, because they are too obsessed to have a proper home. And let’s not forget the mandatory mop of messy hair, the beauty of which depends on how much we’re supposed to fancy them. This is a great story. It should have been a movie. Oh wait, it has been. Usually starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

It’s also a story that shows up in Silicon Valley with the “golden geeks” whiz-kid archetype. What Scott Galloway calls the “gross idolatry of innovators.” We just can’t help ourselves. We love a hero; we love to focus on someone with gifts out of reach for the rest of us. But there’s a hefty price tag we’re paying for the creative genius myth. Its exclusivity puts creativity on a pedestal. The first, baby step in making creativity more accessible is to acknowledge the humble origins of this myth. Creative genius was a blueprint created by one man: Michelangelo. And he did it because he had daddy issues.

We’re all dealing with Michelangelo’s daddy issues.

Michelangelo wanted to be an artist. At the time, being an artist was considered a laboring profession, a slight step up from being a house painter. Michelangelo’s dad was a voracious social climber and wanted more for his son than this lowly profession, famously saying, “He would never suffer his son to be a stonemason.” And Michelangelo wanted nothing more than to please his daddy. “Driven to become an artist, a profession he knew was beneath his dignity, Michelangelo simply redefined the term.”* Michelangelo created a radical claim: the painter or sculptor was no longer just a humble craftsman but a shaman or secular prophet, and the work of his hands was akin to holy writ. Michelangelo’s long, illustrious career marks the point at which the artist definitively transcends his humble origins in the laboring class and takes his place alongside scholars and princes of the church as an intellectual and spiritual leader. 

Michelangelo actually deserved the title of genius (as in, an exceptional level of achievement that few can achieve). That’s not the issue. The problem is the myth he created around his genius. Because it was a myth. Yes, he was a white male; yes, he often worked late; yes, he changed the world forever; and yes, he could be an asshole. But he didn’t always work alone and he wasn’t just born with his talents; he worked extremely hard at them, with fantastic mentors showing him the way. So the blueprint being used for creative genius—that’s survived 500 years, that’s been adopted by everyone from Sherlock Holmes to Steve Jobs to at least one creative director we’ve all worked with—is wrong. This blueprint is being executed by a whole bunch of people not producing Sistine Chapels and is stopping a whole other bunch of people from even trying. 

Source: Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces