Haggerty
Joanna Hamer | Staff Writer
“I can’t say I’m a genius,” Gerard Haggerty said, “but I am smart enough to figure a way to get ‘Gerard Haggerty’ and ‘genius’ into the same title.”
Haggerty will speak tonight at 7 p.m. in the Hultquist Center, giving a talk titled “Genius: How To Define It And How To Achieve It.”
“I hope that will bring a lot of people, since everyone wants to be a genius,” Haggerty said.
Haggerty is an art history professor at the City University of New York Brooklyn College, an art critic who writes for ARTnews, and an artist who has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. As he sees it, there are three different ways to look at genius.
The first definition is someone who changes the world in a way no one else could have.
“Somebody like Freud, or Darwin, or Marx or Einstein, or in the world of art, someone like Giotto, or Caravaggio or Picasso — those people did things, and the whole world was changed, the way we saw the world was changed,” Haggerty said.
A second definition is someone who makes a masterpiece, a work whose permutations can still be seen in today’s art.
“This doesn’t give a lot of hope to most of us, you know,” he said. “Will we change the world? Unlikely. Will we create things that are timeless? We won’t know until after we are gone.”
Haggerty’s talk will focus on a third possible definition of genius that is more attainable, as voiced by Baudelaire: Genius is the ability to recapture childhood at will.
Haggerty will show some of his own work, as well as slides that teach his brand of art history. As a painter with a master’s degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, he has never studied art history.
“I’ve acquired an autodidact’s expertise by teaching it,” he said.
With his background as an art critic, Haggerty can trace lines of inspiration through the works of the past, from sarcophagi to Manet and onward.
“I think of myself as a writer in terms of what I do — talking about art, writing about art,” he said. “I spend a lot of time trying to successfully evoke the spirit of work in words.”
He said he believes the experience of creating art can be incalculably helpful for those who critique it. Though he sometimes wrestles with the choice of whether to spend the day writing or painting, he finds both inform the other in important ways.
“It’s a more complicated and less logical business than somebody who is simply a historian,” he said.
Haggerty enjoys his time teaching at the School of Art and at Brooklyn College, which he considers a melting pot and the personification of the American Dream.
“Any time you get paid for doing what obsesses you, that is great news, I think.”
The Chautauquan Daily 
