What does it mean to be a creative genius? The following clip is from a 2023 60 Minutes interview with legendary music producer Rick Rubin. In it, Rubin describes his creative process and provides an excellent occasion to discuss the relationship of genius and taste in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of art. In my Philosophy and the Arts course, we spend a significant amount of time reading Kant’s Critique of Judgment. I show this video on the day we discuss Kant’s theory of artistic genius. At this point, students are familiar with Kant’s account of taste, the ability to recognize and appreciate the aesthetic quality of beautiful art. In §46, Kant defines genius as “the inborn predisposition of the mind through which nature gives the rule to art” (5:307). Because beautiful art cannot be created according to fixed rules, the artistic genius is a kind of channel for the way beauty appears spontaneously in nature. (My slideshow includes Angelus Silesius’s “Die Rose” on this point: “The rose is without why.”) For Kant, genius has a talent …