Cultural innovation is collective and originates on the margins, not from isolated genius

Evidence

Cultural innovation comes from the margins and is essentially collective. “Art is not produced by one artist, but by several,” the Surrealist painter Max Ernst maintained. “It is to a great degree the product of their exchange of ideas with one another.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 10

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s test-case framing: avant-gardes are produced by conditions (marginality, exchange), not genius — the counterpoint to every claim about why culture stagnates now. — connects to: Most innovations emerge from parallel developments and collective histories — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 681; Scientific discoveries emerge from communal slow accumulation, not lone genius — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 166