An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

praised“feminine”qualities in male creators...but claimed females could

not–or should not–create...The genius’s instinct, emotion, sensibility,

intuition, imagination–even his madnesses [all coded“feminine”]–were

different from those of ordinary mortals...The genius was a male–full of

“virile”energy–whotranscendedhis biology...Creativity was displacedmale

procreativity: male sexuality made sublime...Indeed, the more psychically

feminine genius appeared, the louder the shout that went up,“It’s a boy.”^59

Inextricably interwoven socially with this prevailing conception of genius is

“a continual blotting out of the contributions of women artists”^60 as their

artistic labors, if allowed to take place at all, were by and large relegated to

the“stereotypically female”^61 domestic arts of embroidery, pottery, lacemak-

ing, flower arranging, and so forth.

Originality and imagination within common life

The central points made in these various deconstructions of the nature of

genius and devaluings of the cultivation of individuality are surely correct.

The heroism of abstract expressionist painting had by the early 1960s grown

stale. Just as people grow up speaking one native language or another as a

result of their linguistic circumstances, so too the production of art takes

place against a background of multiple strategies, aims, examples, and con-

ceptions of interest that are historically afforded. Artworks–whether paint-

ings or poems, movies or pots or sonatas–typicallycanbe read accurately

and insightfully both as intended for certain preconceived sectarian audi-

ences and as less than absolutely coherent, with rough edges, uncontrolled

ambiguities, and conflicting attitudes and thoughts in play. It is true that the

modern, post-Renaissance cultural world is significantly different from

earlier and other worlds and true also that its special character shapes how

the making and understanding of art are carried out. Some of the value of

some art, as Mikhail Bakhtin has emphasized in discussing the novel,^62

comes from a polyphonic interplay of opposed points of view, not simply

(^59) Christine Battersby,Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics(London: Women’s
Press, 1989; reprinted Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 3, 6.
(^60) Ibid., p. 6. (^61) Ibid., p. 169.
(^62) See Mikhail M. Bahktin,The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981).
132 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art