Stumped? That's because we're living smack-dab in the golden age of mediocrity.
"There was a time, especially right after World War II, when we had certain people who clearly were geniuses and became celebrities because of it--Einstein, for example," explains rock critic and cultural historian Greil Marcus, author of the book "Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century." "But eventually, the equation was flipped around. Today, anybody who's a celebrity, who attracts a large amount of attention, has to be a genius ... what we're really doing is jettisoning the past. We can say, 'Sure, Dickens was a genius, but look at all the brilliant writers we have now.' That means we don't have to read him anymore. It's a way of saying that we're primary--now is what's important."
Today, the hyping of what passes for genius has become so extreme that it even offends New York-based A-list publicist Dan Klores. "I read about this musician who'd died, and there was a great outpouring of mourning about 'the passing of a genius,' " he says. "And he's done two albums! That's where we are today. We used to have three awards shows--the Emmys, the Oscars and the Tonys. Now we have, what, 50 different ones? The culture is totally dishonest. It's like there's more of everything, so there's more room for bull."
The result is a world in which you don't have to dare to be great, in which a swath of humanity, wide enough to stretch from Frank Gehry to Britney Spears, shares the lofty mantle of genius. Gehry, the architect known for playfully unconventional designs, at least approximates the old-fashioned concept of genius-hood. But Spears? The barely clad, histrionic ex-teen diva whose voice is so thin that some speculate she even lip-syncs interviews? All the same, she's also a genius, according to a concert reviewer from the New York Times, who observed in 2001 that Spears was "an artist whose genius is not for singing--indeed, this performance did not suffer at all from the music's being its least important element--but for teasing out the cravings and fears that haunt the modern world." (If that makes her sound a bit like Edvard Munch with decolletage, remember that it probably was written on deadline.)
