I'm very curious to hear more. How are you defining fraud, Charles? Or does this become apparent when watching the film?

@1 "Because the artist is making something new, he/she is also in a state of making up stuff."

He's defining fraud as making stuff up, which is a fine definition. Ursula K. LeGuin said a novelist is in the business of lying, so same diff.

@1 I agree. It's like the actual article is missing here. There's a provocative hook, then there's a retreat in generalization -- all creativity has an element of fraud. But there's nothing about what, exactly, it means to say that teenage Basquiat was a bit of a fake. (Which ... aren't all teenagers?) That claim needs unpacking. Details. What, specifically, does it refer to?

"Only when a work of art is done can the genius appear. Before it is done, however, the fraud is there as much as the genius. It's one or the other. And one or the other is not possible without being one or the other simultaneously in the creative process."

Maybe I'm not catching some deeper meaning here, but I disagree. In some forms (film, for instance) this is very true. But the more classical types of artistic expression - painting, sculpture, maybe even architecture - can display their creator's genius well before they are "completed."

A nice thought trail proceeds from the end of your comment, Charles--thank you.

My reading is that the difference between a genius and a fraud is reception.

@2
I read it as specific to Basquiat, and not generalized to artists or "geniuses" in particular, hence my questions.

*i read Charles' thinking as...

@7, "This is the nature not only of Basquiat's genius but of all genius: It can't be dissociated from the element of fraud."