I was recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, and I saw many paintings that were, in my view, works of genius. One in particular was a 19th century, full-length portrait of what was clearly a bored teenager. That is, I could clearly tell, through facial expression and posture, that this young woman was bored. My claim is that the artist who made it had a genius-level understanding of how to paint people. He had to be able to consciously recognize the visual cues that most of us unconsciously process, and he had to be able to convey that in paint. Because of the thought processes required to create it, I consider it a work of genius.
