[MD] Picasso vs Disney

[John Carl]

Platt,

What do you think?

I've got only so much money and time, with so many books beckoning from
Amazon's lusty arms, and 50 whole dollars to spend, I need help deciding.
 Are you familiar with Paul Johnson's *Intellectuals*?  It sounds right up
your alley  - The New York times review called it "an intellectual making
fun of intellectuals".  Sounds like a hoot to me, too.   But the one I'm
really interested in, his second book of his trilogy (the third will be *
Heroes*) called *Creators*.

review snippets:

Creators is a riveting collage of a book. Its ambitious scope is adumbrated
by its subtitle: “From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney.”
Shakespeare, Bach, Jane Austen, Turner, and T. S. Eliot are here; so are
Wagner, Tiffany, Victor Hugo, and the dress designer Cristóbal Balenciaga.
(The chapter on Balenciaga and Christian Dior is a special delight.) Along
the way Johnson glances at figures as disparate as Imhotep, vizier or chief
minister to a succession of Egyptian pharaohs circa 2600 B.C., and Thomas
Telford, the great Scottish bridge-builder and engineer. Johnson has
prepared the widest possible canvas upon which to paint his tableau.
Creativity, he points out, is a fundamental God-given grace of human life,
inherent in all of us, as much in the humorist whose creative gift issues in
the transient if utterly absorbing phenomenon of laughter as in the
architect, painter, musician, or writer, whose creativity issues in more
lasting monuments.


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It is worth noting that the expression of creativity, even creativity at a
high level, does not require genius. Johnson devotes a chapter to Jane
Austen (along with some other women novelists), and though he greatly
admires Austen’s novels — what sane person does not? — he is probably right
that she “was not a genius.” This is not to diminish Austen’s achievement
but rather to suggest that genius may not be the essential concomitant of
superlative artistic, intellectual, or cultural achievement. There are after
all plenty of geniuses about. Often, their productions are more curious than
substantial. Think only of Hegel: a man, as Kierkegaard said, who built an
intellectual palace but lived in the guard house. As the English essayist
Walter Bagehot observed in another context, “In the faculty of writing
nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.

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Hey! I like that.  Somebody else used my Kierkegaard quote.  Didn't know it
was of Hegel, but that sure does make sense.

I also like the bit about genius being more full of nonsense than stupidity,
for obvious reasons.

read the whole review<http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=Mjc0Njg1Y2IxYmE4ZjE3YjJiMjRiNzFhY2Y2MDU5OGU=>.
 I think I'm sold.