Well, you are right… of course I don’t believe that Mozart was literally retarded or had a low IQ. But if we are talking about artistic genius and intelligence, he did show a certain behaviour that would be considered childish or dumb. And let’s not even get into how he kept losing all his money.
Some savants have remarkable memories, but by no means all savant abilities are memory abilities. From the Wikipedia link I gave before:
Being on the autism spectrum does not imply low intelligence or retardation. Neither does working in menial jobs all one’s life. Many autistic people are highly intelligent (as are many poor, working people, and recluses, too).
Mental retardation and mental illness are two completely different things. Many great artists were and are mentally ill, so much so that one could argue that art and insanity go hand in hand (not always, of course, so don’t twist my words).
I’m sure there have been a number of great artists with childish or lowbrow sense of humor, and a number of great artists who have been bad with money. Neither of these characteristics is necessarily a sign of low intelligence, however.
Artists can certainly be psychologically tortured, but re intelligence most art that resonates as meaningful requires some planning and intentionality. A not very bright person might get lucky and produce something once that people regard as interesting or meaningful, but it’s unlikely they can do that consistently if they are not very bright.
In reading Warhol’s wiki it’s quite obvious that he deliberately crafted a specific persona for public consumption, one that was quite different than the eager young man on the make he evidenced in his youth. He knew exactly what he was doing.
a bit of googling revealed many results for famous artists “intellectual disability”*. Replacing “intellectual” with “developmental” produces a similar number of results.
Here are some famous names from one of the sites** found:
[ul]
[li]Walt Disney[/li][li]Thomas Jefferson***[/li][li]Louis Pasteur ***[/li][li]George Bernard Shaw ***[/li][/ul]
the intellectual (or developmental) disability part needs to be in quotes
** The site is dedicated to championing disabled people, so it’s undoubtedly biased
*** These people were merely listed as having a learning disability, not necessarily unusually low intelligence.
Jonathan Swift’s education and erudition are undeniable, but ***Gulliver’s Travels ***is still filled with poo poo and pee pee jokes. That type of thing was par for the course in 18th century Europe.
Think of how Monty Python combined Elizabethan poetry with porn and dick jokes. Art, like humor, can be simultaneously sophisticated AND puerile.
Yeah, but if you click on the links when you google intellectual disability and read them most of them are talking about learning disabilities (in the US meaning of the term, not the UK one): you can have an extremely high IQ and still have a learning disability. And developmental disability is just as bad a search term because that includes conditions like autism and ADHD - both of which are deemed neurodevelopmental disorders in DSM V - which can occur even in people with gifted IQs. Only the unPC term “retarded” is likely to produce results about artists who have low IQs instead of people with milder challenges.
