Artistic Genius and Creative Cognition

Thagard, P. (forthcoming). Artistic genius and creative cognition. INTRODUCTION There are highly creative people in all domains of human productivity, including scientific discovery, technological invention, social innovation, and artistic imagination. All of these kinds of creativity require mental operations that generate ideas and other products that are both new and valuable. The main question addressed in this chapter is: What are the processes that produce artistic imagination? I propose hypotheses about creativity that are generalized from research on scientific and technological thinking, and then examine how well those hypotheses apply to the visual, literary, and musical arts. The examination considers the work of 14 leading figures who might plausibly be I need to indicate what I mean by " creative " and " genius ". In line with many other investigators of creativity, I count a product as creative if it is new (novel, original), valuable (important, useful, appropriate, correct, accurate) and surprising (unexpected, non-obvious). The products of creativity range broadly from specific things such as a sculpture, to events such as a performance, to mental representations such as concepts and hypotheses, to methods such as artistic styles. A full theory of creativity needs to account for the generation of new and valuable products of all these kinds. To my knowledge, the generation of methods has been neglected in research on creativity, but we will see that 2 production of new procedures is an important part of creativity in the arts as well as in science and technology. I take a genius to be a person who is extraordinarily creative, that is, someone who produces a large number of very new and highly valuable things, events, mental representations, or methods. This definition applies well to many famous figures in the arts, and justifies selection of the following 14 figures whose work can be used to evaluate hypotheses about artistic imagination: da Vinci and O'Keeffe in painting, Wright and Le Corubusier in architecture, Dickinson and Yeats in poetry, Tolstoy and Joyce in novels, J. S. Mill and Russell in philosophy, Beethoven and the Beatles in music, and Duncan and Graham in dance. Obviously these figures are only samples of artistic imagination and genius, but their centrality in their respective fields makes them legitimate subjects for initial evaluation of hypotheses that can then receive further scrutiny. In my usage, a genius is not someone with a high IQ, but rather a person …