Re: Barbarians vs All Blacks 1973

Walter Mitty wrote: 
On 2005-12-09, Martyn Winters <ukhamlet@xxxxxxxxx> dropped the ball when he ventured :

Ferdi Greyling wrote:


On Thu, 08 Dec 2005 15:30:54 GMT, Martyn Winters
<ziggy.stardust@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<< For me genius

can be seen in the works of Lennon, Van Goch, Wittgenstein, Dafydd ap
Gwilym, Fanny Trollop, but not in the scribblings of over-hyped bean
counters.>>


Lennon? He wasn't that good....

Tom Waits is better.

Anyway, add TS Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis
Borges etc and I cheer with you.

And allow me to point out that in the realm of philisophy, art and
literature there are an equal number of extremely boring plodders as
in maths?

Also in rugby, of course... 

Yes, of course you are correct in this instance, especially about the
distribution of plodders (but not IMHO about Lennon). The thing that
gets my goat is the adulation that number crunchers get. It is
completely disproportionate to the regard with which artists are held
for no reason other than most people reckon they have a novel in them,
or they can paint, create a poem to match those of Keats, or write a
best selling tune, but arcane math is beyond them. The truth is, they
can't do any of these with any degree of accomplishment, but the fact
of their inability in math being obvious and not arguable makes them
believe, incorrectly, that great mathematicians are somehow
intrinsically better and more worthy of the mantle "genius" than great
artists.



It's hard to find a concrete way to describe why I disagree since
anyone can hide behind the mantle of "genius" when it comes to "art".

But anyone who thinks that Damian Hurst is more of a genius than say
Stephen Hawking is nuts. The ability to read, understand, digest and
play with theoretical physics is, to my mind, a tad more difficult
than getting an hallucination and sticking a dead baby into whale
semen or whatever he does.

So that's the vote from the Philistines. Do the Simply Ignorant want to up the ante? How about performance artists? Shoot them, son. Hirst is far from being a genius, but he does produce very high quality art. On the other hand, how many nuclear physicists do you know that can compose something like the 1812 Overture? On the matter of Hawking, didn't he just admit he'd been wrong for 30 years about the retrieval of information from singularities? In fact, wasn't he the only one standing alone in the face of contrary proof until he caved in, that is. Genius?

.

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