Old masters and young geniuses
From the Publisher: When in their lives do great artists produce their greatest art? Do they strive for creative perfection throughout decades of painstaking and frustrating experimentation, or do they achieve it confidently and decisively, through meticulous planning that yields masterpieces early in their lives? By examining the careers not only of great painters but also of important sculptors, poets, novelists, and movie directors, Old Masters and Young Geniuses offers a profound new understanding of artistic creativity. Using a wide range of evidence, David Galenson demonstrates that there are two fundamentally different approaches to innovation, and that each is associated with a distinct pattern of discovery over a lifetime. Experimental innovators work by trial and error, and arrive at their major contributions gradually, late in life. In contrast, conceptual innovators make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, usually at an early age. Galenson shows why such artists as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cezanne, Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf, Robert Frost, and Alfred Hitchcock were experimental old masters, and why Vermeer, van Gogh, Picasso, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, and Orson Welles were conceptual young geniuses. He also explains how this changes our understanding of art and its past. Experimental innovators seek, and conceptual innovators find.
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6recommend
12mentions
9people
2011–2026years
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Sounds like "Old Masters and Young Geniuses"
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133805/ol...
That book used artwork valuation as a performance measure and analyzed it over top artist's lifetimes finding two patterns. The "Young Genius" where an artist has a vision and realizes some innovation and their most valuable works center around that with value tapering off over their life. Picasso. (Who had two peaks but still fit the pattern.) Contrast to the "Old Master." This is someone who keeps refining their craft and their most valuable works and innovations are their late life works. Cézanne.
- It's one data point, here is another perspective that says that depending upon the field of endeavor, people can become more proficient with age. "Old Masters and Young Geniuses" https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w8368/w8368...
- I enjoyed the book Old Masters and Young Geniuses which explored this subject in relationship to art and creativity.
- Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity (by David Galenson)
Influential to someone whose practices and path to success in engineering doesn't follow the normal pattern but is still valid. (At least it was influential to me.)
- This is the thesis of David Galenson's "Old Masters and Young Geniuses", which is a good read. He also talks about how trying to find a single average age of peak creativity hides other possibilities, such as the one he suggests, where there are clusters among the young (conceptual innovations) and old (experimental innovations).
- A distinction I read somewhere, that I think is useful, is that people tend to be either primarily conceptualist in their thinking, or they are empiricists who learn from experience.
Galenson's book Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity discusses this point extensively, in addition to being a pleasure to read on its own.
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