The perceptible forms of art are the last step of a much longer process of intellectual-spiritual transformation and discovery. This process often feels like pure shit, and sensible people avoid it. But an artist who aspires to create something unprecedented cannot avoid this ordeal, because this is the only way to discover a new way to perceive and live out life.

This — and nothing else — is what genius is: the discovery and development of new forms of life that naturally and urgently externalize themselves through creation of forms.

Whoever it was who re-assignment of the word “genius” to high IQ did our culture a disservice. Genius cannot be measured, only detected, because it is always hits us from an angle we don’t know how to expect. What IQ measures is not genius, but ingenuity, our ability to manipulate systems of objects, which includes not only physical objects but intellectual ones as well, such as concepts, techniques and stylistic elements.

For the last 30-some years art has tried to get by on mere ingenuity. Ambitious artists play archeologist and anthropologist, digging and rummaging through other times and places for exotic influences to excite their ingenuity.

This method reliably yields recombinations of stylistic elements useful on making things that might be perceived as new or at least fresh by an audience bored with the artistic products they’ve been consuming — but this approach cannot make the audience itself feel new and see life as new.

And even this modest accomplishment has an expiration date. Sooner or later, the limited spiritual resources of history will be depleted, and a sense that everything that could be has been sets in and we suffer an Ecclesiastes effect.

Until artists learn to find the world beyond art interesting, the world of art will grow less and less interesting. Until artists find meaning in engaging in the whole of life and struggling with it, their art will engage nobody, because it will present no challenge worth a struggle.