David Galenson on Genius: Two Types?

David Galenson

"A Youthful-Looking Experimentalist"

(Image: University of Chicago Experts Guide)

A young man named "Nathaniel" who is studying literature and has recently started his own blog happened to read my entry on "Prodigies" and post a comment:

I think you might be interested in a story Wired did last month called "What Kind of Genius Are You?" It's basically a comparison of two styles of creative achievement: the conceptualist variety that hits people when they're young, but exhausts itself early (examples are Picasso and Ezra Pound); and the experimentalist type that's slow to mature and rises "asymptotically" (the article points to Cezanne and Robert Frost here).

Nathaniel was right -- I was interested. I've passed the link on to others, including the novelist Olen Steinhauer over at Contemporary Nomad, who found the article "[r]eally interesting," probably because he and the other nomads and blog readers had been discussing whether or not Orson Welles was a genius, a discussion triggered by an LA Times article, "Delusions of genius," by Richard Schickel, who argued that Welles was no genius because:

...he could not submit his wayward spirit to institutional discipline.... The rebel pose makes for fine romantic copy, but the fact is that genius in the movies is the antithesis of genius as Welles flightily defined it. It is akin to an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Every great director I've ever known spends months in the editing room, more months on the dubbing and scoring stages, driving themselves and everyone around them crazy with their slavish devotion to detail. When they're not doing that, they're wheedling money out of their backer or fending off suggested improvements. It is how great movies are made.

I didn't enter into this debate over Welles's putative genius because although I've seen and appreciated Welles's great film Citizen Kane, I've never been a Welles fan. I remember too clearly those commercials that he did for Paul Masson Winery back around 1979, authoritatively intoning:

"Paul Masson will sell no wine before its time."

Welles sounded convincing, but he was a talented actor, so of course, he sounded convincing, but it's still a ridiculous thing to say.

But I digress. My point was about the two types of genius that Nathaniel indicated, the conceptual and the experimental. The article to which he linked, "What Kind of Genius Are You?," was written by Daniel H. Pink about the Chicago economist David Galenson, who has worked out a theory of genius in his recent book, Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity (Princeton University Press, 2006):

What he has found is that genius -- whether in art or architecture or even business -- is not the sole province of 17-year-old Picassos and 22-year-old Andreessens. Instead, it comes in two very different forms, embodied by two very different types of people. "Conceptual innovators," as Galenson calls them, make bold, dramatic leaps in their disciplines. They do their breakthrough work when they are young. Think Edvard Munch, Herman Melville, and Orson Welles. They make the rest of us feel like also-rans. Then there's a second character type, someone who's just as significant but trudging by comparison. Galenson calls this group "experimental innovators." Geniuses like Auguste Rodin, Mark Twain, and Alfred Hitchcock proceed by a lifetime of trial and error and thus do their important work much later in their careers. Galenson maintains that this duality -- conceptualists are from Mars, experimentalists are from Venus -- is the core of the creative process. And it applies to virtually every field of intellectual endeavor, from painters and poets to economists.

Note that Welles makes the cut and is classed among the conceptualists, which suggests that Richard Schickel is a bit one-sided in his criticism because he faults Welles for not fitting a category of genius that sounds more like Galenson's experimentalist sort.

Anyway, these finding by Galenson are fascinating -- and his conclusions cohere with my own impressions over the years about two different styles of learning -- but I wonder if some geniuses might encompass both conceptualist and experimentalist styles and thus constitute a third category. Milton, for instance (whom, you may recall, I've occasionally blogged about), strikes me as fitting both categories. He showed extraordinary ability from an early age and wrote some excellent, groundbreaking poetry as a young man and would have been remembered as a great literary figure even if he had died young, but because he lived on to an old age and wrote the epic Paradise Lost, he's remembered for that work of genius more than for his youthful ones.

So ... perhaps Galenson still could do some experimental tinkering on his conceptual scheme...