Writings on artistic greatness and genius [génialité] waver in the main between three types of explanation. Either the brilliant artist is endowed with exceptional talents, about which not much can be said, once they have been detected, except to look at how those talents succeed in expressing themselves(2); or the brilliant artist is a pure social construction, the product of an ideology that wants to confer top value upon certain individuals whose labor is nevertheless fashioned by social forces, the vocabulary of genius stemming here from a mythology that celebrates, in the manner of new gods, those who are the victors in the organization of the arts into tournaments of celebrity(3); or the brilliant artist is a statistically unlikely figure, a two-sided being whose labor is certainly determined by social and economic forces but whose works contain a truth-value that eludes determination on account of the context in which they are produced(4). Examination of the case of Beethoven, one of the emblematic figures of creative genius in the modern era, allows us to compare these three conceptions, to bring out their respective weaknesses, and to offer a solution to the antinomies involved in the question of genius as the social sciences have approached it.
        We have no absolute proof of the presence or absence of talent, because we do not know exactly what talent is, because we do not know how to measure it independently of what it produces--works--and because measuring the value of works is not a simple and natural process that would be invested with an incontestable objectivity. Evaluations diverge, they change, artists’ value can be revised upwards or downwards, and so on. How, then, is one to get a handle on it?
        Can one do without the hypothesis that exceptional talent entails an overwhelming advantage in the competition for success and thus is the indisputable origin of a genius’s career? It suffices to make a slight alteration in this hypothesis in order to discover a more fruitful path.

Genius: Relative Comparison and Dynamic Amplification of Differences in Talent

        We can very well assume that at the start there exists only a very slight difference in talent between two artists, one of whom will become what we call a genius. But we also have to assume that this difference is perceived rather early on by those who make comparisons (critics, musicians, audiences). And next we need to explain why this difference suffices to concentrate the main demand on the one who is judged slightly more talented and therefore to give that person a much higher reputation than what his real advantage in artistic value might be.
        In the course of artists’ first formative experiences, abilities manifest themselves differently and unequally from one individual to the next. What remains indeterminate is the question of what kind of difference in talent there will be between certain creative persons who, in the more or less long term and whether lastingly or not, are going to succeed, and others, who will be less well off. Expressed in terms of probabilities of success, the advantage a hopeful talent procures at an early date in his career may be slight, but it suffices that there be, in each test of competitive comparison, a perceptible difference, whether small or large, in order for this talent to be able to attract the investments and secure the bets of the system’s actors (the artist’s teachers, professional musicians, patrons, concert promoters, critics, audiences). The intrinsically formative character of labor situations points to the same mechanism: there exists an optimum profile for increasing one’s skills which is a function of the number and variety of one’s working experiences and of the quality of the collaborative networks the artist calls upon in the unfolding of his projects.
        This dynamic argument indicates how differences in talent, initially perceived as slight, can give rise to an increasing differentiation between the careers of two originally comparable artists. A self-reinforcing mechanism acts on the pace and breadth of talent development: the creative person who is more highly valued and is sought after to a greater extent can find better learning opportunities and better occasions to test his abilities, thanks to the extent and variety of the support he receives and the collaborations in which he engages, thanks to gains in experience that are connected with the dissemination of his works, and thanks to the forms of social and psychological self-reassurance a growth in his reputation brings his way. The competition and uncertainty that permanently preside over creative action ensure that tests of talent will retain their dynamic tension.

Selective Matchings

        Here the second lever of differences in reputation fits in. For a promising artist to obtain the best chances of developing his talent, it is important to link him up with professionals of comparable value in the other trades that are necessary to the production and circulation of works: a film director of repute will seek to engage first-rate professionals for key posts (cinematography, scenario, editing, costumes, etc.); a publisher can entrust to his most seasoned literary editor working relationships with the publishing house’s most talented or most promising writers. Artistic worlds combine flexible organizational architectures (networks, projects) with a way of structuring artistic teams that brings in professionals of good quality or equivalent reputation--or, to put it more precisely, that establishes selective matchings: labor markets for the most skilled jobs are thus structured through professional match-ups.
        It is on this basis that an analysis of differences in success makes networks of relationships constructed by the artist play a decisive role. Whether one is talking about Beethoven’s patrons, his performers, or the various categories of professionals with whom he established working and collaborative ties, it was by following a formula of selective matchings that his networks of activity were organized. When artistic labor is no longer based on an ongoing connection with an employer within a stable organization--as was the case, for example, with the employment of the kapellmeister in a prince’s court--one’s career is built up from project to project within relationships of negotiation and cooperation where the various partners (musicians, concert organizers, patrons, publishers, critics, instrument makers, writers and poets, etc.) are brought in as a function of the level of their reputation and as a function of their artistic and social influence. The dynamic of a successful creative career involves a movement of rising mobility within a stratified world of networks of people who know each other and who collaborate among themselves: when talent is a complementary factor of production and not an additive one, the gathering of talents of approximately equivalent level, each in his own field (as performers, organizational intermediaries, publishers, financiers), has a multiplier effect on the project’s chances of success and on each collaborator’s chances of building up a reputation.
        Among the profits drawn from this hierarchization of networks involving match-ups, not the least of these is that of mutual apprenticeship--as is shown, for example, by numerous cases of fruitful collaboration between the most talented composers and performers who are held in the highest repute, and, here, between Beethoven and the renowned performers (Clement, Duport, Kreutzer, Rode, Schuppanzigh, Stich, etc.) with whom he worked and who were able to provide him with assistance, support, and new relationships with other patrons in other social worlds. Charles Rosen emphasizes the decisive role of these musicians: “the few aristocrats who financed Beethoven were advised by musicians who told them where to put their money for the best cultural investment.”(5) He also insists on the major role literary circles of poets and novelists played in giving Beethoven support as well as in acclimating people to the idea of music as great art, Hayden’s work having previously offered an internationally celebrated model of cultural greatness.
        It is in this way that I can explain how differences in talent that were initially slight or of uncertain import can quickly be amplified and consolidated via the play of selective matchings: artists increase their chances of developing their skills through contact with equally talented partners and can embark upon demanding creative projects with greater ease. We now better understand how, starting from rankings of reputation whose initial measure is often quite vague (promising or minor talent, first-rate or second-rate artist, valuable works or run-of-the-mill products, etc.), a finely graduated hierarchization is constituted--one that is, of course, constantly open to question because it is subject to interpersonal competitive tests but that will also engender very unequal chances for the flowering of creative talent.

A Land of Acceptance: Greatness as an Aesthetic Canon

        Having reached this point, I can now bring together the two sides of my analysis. Individual differences in talent, whatever their origin, and a segmented structuration of the market for creative labor that works through the play of selective matchings constitute, through their dynamic interaction, the two forces whose combination produces the considerable variance in reputations that exists and points, through statistical distribution of aptitudes, toward the exceptional artist who will be declared a genius. Still, exceptional talent requires a land of aesthetic acceptance. This will be the object of an analysis of the matrix that works out “greatness” as canonical aesthetic value. It constitutes, moreover, the other point that separates our analysis from a constructivist and functionalist analysis of a high style in music, which proceeds instead through an exhaustive reduction of layers of meaning to pure social relations of force.

Notes

Adorno, Theodor W. Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962). Trans. from the German by E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1989.
_____. Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music: Fragments and Texts (1993). Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Alpers, Svetlana. Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1992). Trans. Susan Emanuel. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996.
_____. “Bref impromptu sur Beethoven, artiste entrepreneur.” Sociétés & Représentations, 11 (2001): 15-18.
Caves, Richard E. Creative Industries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Cooper, Barry. Beethoven. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
DeNora, Tia. Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792-1803. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Elias, Norbert. Mozart: Portrait of a Genius (1991). Ed. Michael Schröter. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Goehr, Lydia. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Kivy, Peter. The Possessor and the Possessed: Handel, Mozart, Beethoven and the Idea of Musical Genius. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
Menger, Pierre-Michel. Portrait de l’artiste en travailleur. Paris: La République des Idées/Seuil, 2003.
_____. Le travail créateur. Gallimard/Le Seuil/École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2009.
Moore, Julia. Beethoven and Musical Economics. PhD thesis. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1987.
Rosen, Charles. “Did Beethoven Have All the Luck?” The New York Review, November 14, 1996: 57-63. Reprinted in Charles Rosen. Critical Entertainments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, chapter 8.
Rosen, Sherwin. “The Economics of Superstars.” American Economic Review, 75 (1981): 845-58.
Solomon, Maynard. Beethoven. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Schirmer Books, 1998.
Sternberg, Robert J. Ed. Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Warnke, Martin. The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist (1985). Trans. David McLintock. Cambridge, England and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Wolff, Christoph. Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.