There's Genius in the Air

This year, Zadie Smith’s essay “The Instrumentalist” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. She reviewed the film “Tar.” A focal point of both the film and the essay was an explosive argument between the film’s protagonist, Lydia Tar, a famous middle-aged classical music conductor, and Max, a young Julliard student who professes an inability to take Bach’s music seriously due to Bach’s misogyny. It represented a collision of generational visions: the idea that artworks are limitless sites of infinite play and boundless interpretation despite the artist’s limitations vs. the idea that artworks are inseparable from the artist’s limitations. Despite Smith’s personal view that the value of art isn’t whether one agrees with it, but whether it has the potential to be analyzed, she concedes that, ultimately, “every generation makes new rules.”

Earlier this month, famed Black Arts Movement poet Nikki Giovanni became an ancestor (R.I.P.). After spending the majority of the last 50 years teaching, writing, and speaking around the country to modest fanfare, Giovanni returned to prominence in recent years after a 1971 conversation between she and James Baldwin resurfaced. She was in her late 20s and Baldwin was in his late 40s. It, too, was a collision of generational visions. Their dialogue went viral because it was, in large part, about the viability of black love - whether black men and black women could sustain romantic relationships with each another in the context of an antiblack world where black people (men, in particular, if you let Baldwin tell it) are perpetually brutalized and denied ownership of both self and resources. They weren’t talking about black love for its own sake, but black love as an incubator for creating a collective future that black children could be brought into without living in a re-production of the past. Giovanni despairs, “I really see so many games being run by uncreative, stupid people.” Baldwin responds, “You can’t create anything unless you have been given - however you get it, I don’t know - the belief or the rage or the madness or the necessity out of yourself to do it.”

Indeed, this year’s most creative cultural moments have been fueled by belief, rage, madness, and necessity. As a result, they’ve been responded to with desperate efforts to destroy them: people didn’t think that Kendrick (an iconic menace definitely fueled by all of the above) might have actually ended Drake’s career until Drake got desperate and sued UMG; the Government was desperate when it charged Luigi Mangione with terrorism for “attempting to influence government policy by intimidation or coercion” by assassinating UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, even though we know that private health insurers aren’t official government entities; in an act of desperation, Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party’s Presidential candidate less than 100 days before the election, not only because it was necessary to replace an aging incumbent, but to redeem the Party establishment after a series of terrible political miscalculations; and Trump’s re-election itself was the product of an increasingly young, diverse, and technocratic G.O.P. desperately laying claim to the glories of white supremacy.

Likewise, the proliferation of nostalgia - whether it be Kim Kardashian crawling on the floor singing Santa Baby in a retro haze on Christmas Day or the hundredth remake of a genuinely original 90s/00s film - is desperation on-demand. It cynically attempts to eliminate all the risk of creating by simply re-creating. By definition, re-creation isn’t creation - an original product of the mind - at all. The uninspired desire to guarantee that a vision is already liked, understood, and validated is desperate. And the danger of this kind of desperation is the devaluation of perspective and intellect. It is, in fact, the devaluation of the future itself. If Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk have taught us anything, it’s that Silicon Valley can’t be the only ones truly, imaginatively, and audaciously thinking about what’s next.

Desperation may be a way to manufacture another shot at relevance or legitimacy, but it’s soulless. Its existence is a reaction, not a response. But its presence is also an indication that something’s on the other side. Genius is already in our midst. Cheers to that.