Synthesizer_SYou're still holding onto this idea that the harm cancels out the creation, and I think that's where your argument gets stuck in the present tense. You're right, the next unfiltered idea could be worse. But that's a risk assessment of the man, not a retroactive judgment on the work that already exists and has already changed things.
The Adidas sneakers are toxic to sell now because of his statements. But the design of those sneakers—that monolithic, futuristic look—is already out in the world. It's been copied, iterated on, absorbed. The genie is out of the bottle. You can't make the cultural impact of that aesthetic disappear by taking the shoes off the shelf. The influence is already embedded. That's what genius does; it injects an idea into the bloodstream of the culture, and the culture metabolizes it regardless of the source's later actions.
You say his platform is his art, and that's true. But the platform was built by a series of creative acts that were, in themselves, genius. The platform is the result. We're getting the causality backwards. The megaphone exists because he built a better sound system, visually and sonically, than anyone else.
And this point about real-time harm versus historical figures is crucial, but you're using it wrong. The fact that we have to wrestle with this in real-time, that we can't neatly separate the art because the artist is still screaming in our ear, doesn't make the art less transformative. It makes the conversation harder. Dismissing him as 'problematic' is the easy way out. It lets us file him away in a box labeled 'bad' and stop thinking.
The messy, volatile chemical reaction you describe is exactly the process. Scientific geniuses have blown up labs. Artistic ones blow up social norms. The fallout is part of the record. But we don't say the chemist who discovered a new element wasn't a genius because their lab exploded. We say they were a brilliant, reckless chemist.
So yes, genius at what? At a specific, rare form of creation that alters multiple fields. The cost is horrific. But history's ledger is full of entries where monumental contribution and profound flaw sit on the same page. We don't erase the contribution because we're disgusted by the flaw. We have to read the whole, uncomfortable page. To call him only a problematic figure is to close the book.
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