The Death of the Genius

Yesterday, Norway’s King Harald died.¹ On the same day, Prince released a new album.²

The King is dead. Long live the Prince.

»Perhaps the greatest creative legacy is not a finished body of work, but a set of generative operations that allows somebody else to continue«

The coincidence is absurd. It made me think of how strange it is that a dead artist continues to release new work. A few months back, Spotify told me Johann Sebastian Bach had started the countdown to his latest album. Bach has been dead since 1750.

Prince is probably the artist I’ve returned to most often in my life, and the one whose creative capacity I find most impressive. He wasn’t just great at making a particular kind of music. He invented new genres, then became restless and abandoned them. At his home studio at Paisley Park, engineers and musicians were on constant standby, supporting his obsessive recording, rearranging, and reworking. Over decades, this produced an enormous archive known as the Vault. One long-standing speculation puts the almost unimaginable body of unreleased songs at »enough to produce an album a year for a century«.³

Yesterday’s release, Timeless, contains ten of them: previously unreleased recordings made between 1977 and 2016.⁴ It’s not a new Prince album in the ordinary sense, but someone else’s selection from a creative process that the artist can no longer continue. They have the recordings, but they don’t have Prince’s future judgement. That distinction matters.

We tend to think of creative works as objects: a song, a painting, a building, a scientific paper. But a work can also be understood as the output of a generative system: decisions, constraints, and rules that produce possibilities. The work is what remains after those constraints have been applied. The archive preserves the outputs without necessarily preserving the system that produced them. It’s the same question I was circling yesterday at Kew’s Palm House,⁵ in a different key: not what we preserve, but what we keep possible.

This is where the idea of genius becomes interesting. For the philosopher Immanuel Kant, genius was the talent that »gives the rule to art«.⁶ But the genius could not simply state the rule: the artist did not necessarily know how the ideas had arrived, or possess a procedure that could be handed to someone else. Genius produced the rule through the work itself.

What if the rule could be recovered, or even handed to someone else? There are other ways of leaving a creative legacy. In Possible Palladian Villas, art professor George Hersey and programmer Richard Freedman reconstruct the generative rules behind Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio’s buildings.⁷ Palladio is gone, but the machinery of his creativity can be recovered through a kind of architectural archaeology.

Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt spent much of his career making such rules explicit: instructions from which other people could produce works. The artist authored procedures capable of generating objects he would never physically make himself.⁸

This suggests three kinds of creative afterlife: the archive, where the dead leave behind things they made; the reconstruction, where later generations recover the logic that produced them; and the instruction, where the creator deliberately leaves procedures that allow the work to continue.

Perhaps the greatest creative legacy is not a finished body of work, but a set of generative operations that allows somebody else to continue. It would make for a different idea of the creative genius: less the mysterious expressions of a lone creator, more a system of methods that continue beyond the individual. Less romantic, perhaps. But more generous.

Death doesn’t necessarily have to be the end of authorship. It could be the point at which the authorship changes form. Prince’s music will continue to inspire people. A teenager will hear a Prince track and turn its sophisticated harmonic progressions, dense layering of textures, and syncopated drum patterns into something new. But inspiration isn’t the same as inheritance. The more interesting heritage might be a creative person leaving behind not only their works, but the machinery of their curiosity. A legacy OS.

Perhaps the most generous way to prepare for death is not to make sure your work survives, but to make sure someone else can continue making things from it.

Here’s how I went about it. Here are the things I tried. Here are the things I couldn’t solve. Here are the rules I discovered. Here are the rules I broke. Here are the materials I accumulated. Here are the questions I never answered.

Now you carry on.

References