Mel Gibson's Suffering

While I agree that a lot of the best art has come out of suffering, I don't think it is a pre-requisite. Is there no place in art for a celebration of the best and brightest things in life? If you have to have, for example, suffered dreadful heartbreak to write a love story, then all we are going to get are tragic love stories. I don't think most of Mozart's work came out of suffering - he was very poor and ill as he got older, but most of his great compositions came about when he was young, healthy, talented and feted as a great artist. And I would argue that Mozart was a genius, and I only give that term to one other artist.

The artist must shape suffering into a digestable form. Suffering is not art... it is formless and cruel... sheer pain is always very difficult to understand. You are right in arguing that Genius has nothing to do with suffering. Genius is a gift from God. Andrew: I was actually being sarcastic about Mel Gibson. He talks about suffering and art and pain, but his movies do not express suffering... they express a schizophrenia between normalcy and madness due to very stressful circumstances. Passion is something that comes out of the heart and the desire for something more permanent, beautiful, and truthful than what lies around us. MAybe I should stop being so sarcastic. Mozart was a genius, a natural genius. Michelangelo, on the other hand, did his most interesting work near the end of his life.

Leonardo has to be a candidate.

Leonardo was a genius. Mozart never knew when his next pay cheque was coming though, did he? But I don't think he suffered like other artists, I agree. He is celebratory, but I think all the best art gets to that point eventually, when they get past the suffering and stop letting the suffering be the source of their inspiration and see it in a broader sense. William Blake was a genius I think. Maybe Beethoven too. But he gave suffering a bad name! Botticelli is another. El Greco. Geniuses are generally people who transcend their time and place. Probably a load of scientists I've never herd of were geniuses.

I can NEVER tell if you're being sarcastic, Steven. Tone is so difficult on the net. Passion of the Christ might well have made money, but if it did, it was rather a long shot. Most movies lose money, most religious movies lose money, most movies shot in a foreign language lose money. If Gibson made any dollar out of it, it wasn't a patch of what he could have made by doing Mad Max 5 or something with Lucy Liu in it. Martina - I might actually give you Blake. You've put your finger on what I think of as being a necessity for genius - that they in some way transcend the time they are in. Nearly all scientists just got there first - someone else would have come up with it, just maybe years later. I don't even think I'd accept Einstein - his ideas are all interesting, some even revolutionary, but apart from inventing Freon, they have not actually added anything to most people's quality of life. As for E=M Csquared - yes, this idea did lead to atom bombs, but Newton had already hinted at it "Are not light and gross matter intracontavertible?" Emma - I have a reason why I don't consider Leonardo to be a genius, but I can't think of it at the moment - my head is full of fuzzy-felt.

AH, so when you write your stories, you get out one of those sticky boards. Give me Leonardo, meany.

I would agree that Mel Gibson took a huge financial risk funding the film by himself. By all odds, it should have been a finanical disaster. I have no problem at all with him getting free publicity through controversy. Everyone tries to do that, but if the film were a complete dud, no one would go to see it. Of course he did it for the money, at one level, but there were much more secure ways of making money with far less risk. Still, I would not describe this as suffering for art. He was already very wealthy. Even a flop would not have harmed him all that much as a percentage of his total wealth.

Does second-hand suffering qualify?

I have decided to award Leonardo genius status for inventing the Calculating machine hundreds of years before Blaise Pascal. IBM have made this wooden calculator from his sketches, but they refuse to let people inspect it any more to see if it works. Half the engineers who looked at the plans said that it would not work in reality, the other half thought that it would, but only IBM know the answer and they won't tell us. (Of course, the Chinese invented the abacus, but that involves people doing the work, Leonardo and Pascal's machines transfer the process of calculation to the machine) His perspective is still knacked on the Last Supper, though.

'His perspective is still knacked on the Last Supper, though.' lol, Andrew! So does the perspective on hundreds of the most brilliant masterpieces, you old fusspot... l

http://www.essentialart.com/acatalog/Fra_Angelico_The_Annunciation.html the link's too long for the < and >, sorry...

Mr. Bean is definitely a genius in my book, but nowadays, I just don't feel that he has it anymore. He used to be able to express all gradations of anxiety with his face. He just doesn't do that anymore. A genius expresses his time. Time is the fourth dimension, and what geniuses express is their time in a semiotic that is understandable in other time frames and spaces. The reason that Mr. Bean is a genius is because I swear that he expresses the nihilism and absurdity of our time. Our heroes are no longer able to hold us together. We need Mr. Bean!

Mr Benn possibly, Mr Bean no.

Yes to Mr Benn...

Who is Mr. Benn and why was I not informed that he was indeed a genius? If Mr. Bean and Mr. Benn is a genius, that means that Ben Gay, the creator of Ben Gay products was also a genius. Which would imply that Beethoven was also a genius. SO Beethoven is a genius. The thing about Mel Gibson is that he not only makes lots of money off of Jesus Christ but he causes a lot of suffering for the Jews in a very historically difficult time for the Jews. I understand the point that there is a virulent new anti-Jewishism. American Jewish identity is being threatened as Kathryn Hellerstein (American Jewish Literature) and Alan Dershwitz (Harvard Law Professor) argue. If one really wants to irk the Jews, start rubbing your nose. This really irks the Jews.

And why exactly would we be interested in irking the Jews? Mr Benn, Stephen, is an English cartoon character, who wears a suit and bowler hat, but who instead of going to work goes to a fancy-dress shop and hires a costume, which takes him off to have wild adventures. Whereas Mr Bean is cheap, shoddy, lazy, uninspired, French-humour which demeans Rowan Atkinson far beyond even his association with Richard Curtis rom-com films ever could. Mr Benn has 'suddenly, the shopkeeper appeared', Mr Bean has a mole and a teddy bear. Mr Benn has 'a souvenir to keep as a momento of his adventure', Mr Bean has a 'comical' interlude using an electric razor to remove nasal hair. Perhaps I do not speak for all of Britain, but in general, I think we consider Mr Bean in the same way as the Americans consider Jerry Lewis - it is a complete mystery to natives of each country to understand why other nations would find this tripe amusing. (the same is true in reverse of Adam Sandler, who simply does not export at all well - tell me, is he SUPPOSED to be retarded in every movie he appears in, or is that just what he's ACTUALLY like?) IMHO, Beethoven although very talented was not a genius. For me, genius implies something like taking ideas and developing concepts that were more than just building on what has gone before - it requires a leap, an intuition, a brushing of the faces of angels.

Woolf?

A good try, Emma. Sadly, the fact that I love her to bits cannot influence me in my miserly definition of the word genius - my approach here is guided by my adamant belief that the word is scattered round too easily when what we mean is exceptionally smart or gifted or talented. I think Woolf is very important, not least for her "Affable Hawk" argument about the importance of women writers and the fetters on them; but I don't think she transcends the very good writers of her generation or earlier to be something utterly unique and wonderful. This is not necessarily a bad thing - Borges invented an entirely new form of literature and is without a doubt the smartest writer since Coleridge and I adore nearly everything he ever produced, but I STILL don't consider him to be a genius, because I think that is such a big word, that we need to reserve it for a very select few. Similarly, I'd love to award that status to G K Chesterton, who never wrote a clumsy sentence, juggled ideas like most writers use pronouns and was as comfortable writing tiny essays on chalk as huge polemics on economics and religion or even the most finely crafted detective stories. But alas, I am hamstrung by my own rigorous standards. I am, I think, going to allow William Blake. After all, he saw angels in mulberry trees in Peckham, and it takes either a very special visionary or some very serious drugs to see angels (or indeed trees) in Peckham. Plus, he left a body of work which was massively influential both in writing and art. And I think that this is not work which could have been replicated in part by anyone else. Perhaps the seminal Bodger and Badger?? The incomparable Chuckle Brothers, with their almost Beckett-like pathos of "to me, to you, to me, to you"

El Greco? Chagall?

Andrew, what do you mean when you call someone a genius? Do you mean that the genius is so far above everyone else that he or she can only be called a "genius?" Someone who surpasses everyone in her field? Does a genius have to pass the "test of time?" Must her works be eternal? Must her works express something eternal in her time frame also or do you mean someone who makes you feel sublime, elevated, ethereal?

For me, it must be all of those things, but a bit more as well. I am looking really for someone who, if they hadn't existed, nobody else would have partially filled the void. Most scientists, for example, are building on the works of others, or were the first to complete something that others were working on, so I would not include any scientists. Marvellous though I think Woolf was, there were contemporaries working in a similar vein - Eliot and Joyce to name two significant ones. The same with most painters. If you disappeared the candidate from existence and thus anyone who was influenced by their work was suddenly not, how big a gap would they leave ? I am wanting far more than excellence from a genius, I am wanting something that would not have existed in any similar form had they not lived. Da Vinci was ahead of his time, but everything he did would have been arrived at by others, just a little later; whereas I don't think there would have been music anything like Mozart's if he had not lived.

Once you come to America and see the incredible stupidity of the average American, you'll enjoy the humour of Adam Sandler and Jerry Lewis.