The Pursuit of Happiness
Because I plan to do occasional posts on literature, painting, cinema and music, I thought it would be useful to sketch out my “model” of how to think about trends in the arts. In this post, I’ll use 16 th century Italian mannerist painting as a lens through which to examine recent trends in cinema, as well as the distinction between artistic talent and artistic greatness. In particular, I’ll argue that a high level of artistic talent is actually very widespread, but artistic greatness is rare because it requires a very specific and uncommon mix of talent and opportunity.
[Reading the comments, it’s clear than a number of readers have better taste than I do. This makes me a bit reluctant to pontificate on the arts. But some readers seem to like the posts, and perhaps this will spur some interesting discussion in the comment section.]
I’ve heard people suggest that it was a sort of miracle that there were so many artistic geniuses in Italy right around 1500. Well, economists are the sort of people who tell little children that Santa doesn’t exist, and I’m here to tell you that there was no miraculous clustering of talent in Italy. The world is full of geniuses.
