You can't stay in solitude forever. Come to think of it, I discussed this with Version once. We were trying to think of musicians who had developed in total isolation from any relevant peer community and couldn't come up with any. Even the iconoclasts and rugged individualists inevitably find their way to some kind of artistic social sphere (however niche it may be). For a time, they have allies, mentors, and competitors. So before you get to occupy the master’s study, you have to spend some time away from your bedroom and actually... go outside. At least figuratively.
Some affirmation of this comes in Brian Eno's concept of scenius. He describes it as follows:
I was an art student and, like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and Giotto and so on who sort-of appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution.
As I looked at art more and more, I discovered that that wasn’t really a true picture.
What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work.
The period that I was particularly interested in, ’round about the Russian revolution, shows this extremely well. So I thought that originally those few individuals who’d survived in history – in the sort-of “Great Man” theory of history – they were called “geniuses”. But what I thought was interesting was the fact that they all came out of a scene that was very fertile and very intelligent.
So I came up with this word “scenius” – and scenius is the intelligence of a whole… operation or group of people. And I think that’s a more useful way to think about culture, actually. I think that – let’s forget the idea of “genius” for a little while, let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work.
Interestingly, his description doesn't completely match how we often use the term. On Dissensus, we tend to set scenius in opposition to genius not just conceptually, but in terms of membership. We categorize our favorite musicians as either individualistic geniuses OR the products of a collective scenius. But that's not exactly what Eno is saying. As he describes it, the two concepts are closely entwined. Scenius functions as a sort of launch pad that allows what we ordinarily call "genius" to get off the ground.
We can integrate this idea into our envisioned path. Besides the two stages described in the previous post, there has to be a brush with scenius. So we have the "teenage bedroom" stage, which is about letting your mind wonder, and the "master's study" stage, which is about realizing your vision--and now an additional "scenius" stage.
But what is this stage "about"? I would contend that it's about apprenticeship. As I said earlier, the teenage bedroom doesn't require focus or discipline, yet the master’s study does. So you need to learn those skills at some point. And getting involved in the sort of "ecology of talent" discussed above can help you do that.
When you become part of a scene, you have to learn to meet its standards. This is somewhat true of any social group, but it's particularly true of the sort of milieu that Eno has in mind. To be a constituent part of scenius, not merely an onlooker, you need to be able to hold your own. This means absorbing ideals and developing skills that other members view as crucial. It means learning how to impress and win over your peers. Here, unlike in the teenage bedroom, you are learning and creating in accordance with an external model, as opposed to being lead entirely by your own whims. So “apprentice” seems like an apt term for someone at this stage. An apprentice to the scene.
For an example of what I'm talking about, consider this youtube commenter's take on early Afx:
The qualitative judgements of the early and later work here aren't important. What is important is the observation that before Aphex became a full on auteur, he just another kid learning how to DJ and make tracks he could play in a rave. A member of the scene, rather than standing apart from it. If you only knew Aphex as "that one electronic music super genius who gets namechecked by indie rock musicians" (like I did when I first saw this comment years ago), this interpretation of his artistic development would surprise you. The way he's talked about in the indie kid sphere could merit an entire post in itself--but suffice to say that you do not get descriptions like: "one of thousands of artists", "nothing special at the time", or "he was good but so were many others". You get this image of Aphex as a lone eccentric--but there was a time when he was on more or less the same page as everyone else.
Together, the teenage bedroom and scenius prepare you for the master's study. One does not sequentially follow the other, since these two stages
don't build on each other so much as provide complementary skills. If
you skip the teenage bedroom stage, you'll know how to imitate and
impress with your work--but not how to extrapolate creatively beyond
what others around you are doing at the moment. And if you skip the scenius stage,
you won't learn how to make anything worthwhile at all.
But one question remains: once you're part of a community where you're surrounded by energetic, creative, generally inspiring people, why would you ever leave it behind for the comparative loneliness of the master's study? That's what we'll be thinking about in the next post.
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