According to the Ancient Greeks, art (be it painting, writing or whatever) was the result of a collaboration between a human being who showed up to work and his Daemon who took his instruction from the gods.  The Daemon told the person what to do and, if the artist listened well and if his Daemon was half-way competent they produced a work of art.  If either the Daemon or the human failed in his assigned task, the work would flop.  The peoples of the Middle Ages would not even let the artist talk to the gods through an intermediary (competent or not).  Only priests and the Pope could talk to the Divine.  So the artist became a craftsman who worked in a team and got paid by the hour.  In other words, for most of human history, if your work of art fell flat, it was not your fault and if it was a stunning success, you could not take all the credit.  You were just a human being doing your job.  All that changed during the Renaissance.

As Elizabeth Gilbert, the renowned author of Eat, Pray Love, put it in her now-viral speech on the subject, during the Renaissance we had this big idea and the big idea was let’s put the individual at the center of the universe above all gods and mysteries and there’s no more room for mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine, and it’s the beginning of rational humanism and people start to believe that creativity can come completely from the self… and for the first time you hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius rather than having a genius.  And I’ve got to tell you, I think that was a huge error.

This idea places too much responsibility on the individual (the artist now has to be a kind of Greek god.  The psychological pressure of this often transforms a perfectly normal human being into a fairly unstable narcissist. When they succeed, the artists of our day are insufferably self-centered; when they fail, these same artists often commit suicide. We should not wonder at this.  Human beings were not cut out to be gods.

Of course, if you can handle the psychological pressure of being a semi-divine, you stand to make loads of money.  History of art is replete with artists who made a killing from the genius myth.  Michelangelo, for example, went so far as to burn his sketches.  He wanted to leave behind only finished masterpieces so that people could only wonder how he could have created such wonders.  Of course if you really want to make a killing off of the genius myth, you should become an art collector.  For (and here’s a dirty little secret) art is not worth more because it is good or because you spent a lot of time on it.  What sets the value of a piece is its perceived degree of divine inspiration.

And who gets to determine how divinely inspired is a work of art?  Art collectors do.  And they, we as a society agree, are mere mortals.  And what do these mere mortals think is divinely inspired?  Well, some of it’s OK but a lot of it (to my way of thinking at least) is not all that great.  But whether or not you agree with me (and there’s no accounting for taste), the point is that our idea of the artist as a suffering god creating masterpieces (often at the cost of his very life) leads us to the incredible position that mere mortals get to decide just how divine that god is.  So not only is the idea of the artist as divine destructive for the artist, it doesn’t even make sense!

Maybe it’s time to rethink our ideas about creativity.  Maybe, as Elizabeth Gilbert suggests, it’s time to bring the Daemons back.  Or maybe it’s time to start thinking of the artist as a skilled craftsman.  Neither idea will be good for the art collector.  (Who wants to collect pieces created at least in part by mythical creatures or by glorified engineers?)  But it will be good for the artists’ health.  And you know what?  I think it will also result in better art.

Related Article: What is Art?