The Wiley Handbook of Genius

7 Artistic Genius and Creative Cognition

Paul Thagard

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 considered geniuses, drawn from seven artistic fields: painting, architecture, novels, poetry, philosophy, music, and dance.

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, nonobvious; see, for example, Boden, 2004; Kaufman & Sternberg, 2010; Simonton, 2012). 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 ...