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гений (Genius)[English text translated into Russian]. Traces the Romantic concept of genius on modern and contemporary art.

This article traces the Romantic concept of genius through Young, Diderot, Goethe, Heine, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche through to its relationship to the Freudian unconscious and its relevance for art in the modern and postmodern periods. The romantic concept of genius is the foundation stone of the modern and postmodern concept of the ‘fineness’ of fine art. It is giant geniuses such as van Gogh and Picasso who serve to define fine art as a valid endeavour in the communal imagination. In this sense the romantic concept of genius possesses a sociological function serving as a justification for avant-gardist experimentation that would otherwise be scorned. It was Renato Poggioli in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1968) who made the important connection between romanticism and avant-gardism but he did not focus on genius. It is argued here that a line of evolution in aesthetics can be traced back to romanticism that connects the contemporary context with the key romantic idea of genius despite attempts to break away from romanticism such as Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’.

The romantic concept of genius stems from an exploration of inner nature a notion that possesses enduring importance to fine art not only in the 19th century but throughout the 20th century. The notion that fine art should represent something profoundly inner rather than something superficially outer is fundamental to understanding the modern art. It is also fundamental to understanding postmodern art due to the fact that conceptualism carries on the project of representing the Idea: the mysterious creative process within. Indeed even the postmodern focus on surface and simulation (Baudrillard) entails an implicit melancholic concept of a spiritual depth now lost entirely in the wake of the victory of consumerism.

The Romantic concept of genius is traced through Young, Diderot, Goethe, Heine, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to its relationship to the Freudian unconscious and its relevance for art in the modern and postmodern periods. It was Poggioli in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1968) who made the connection between romanticism and avant-gardism but he did not focus on genius. The notion that fine art should represent something profoundly inner rather than superficially outer is fundamental to understanding the modern art. It is also fundamental to understanding postmodern art due to the fact that conceptualism carries on the project of representing the Idea.