Reviewed by: Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism Brian Tucker Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism. By Paul Fleming. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. 226 pages. $55.00 Paul Fleming begins his latest book, an astute examination of the conflicts surrounding exemplarity and mediocrity in German letters, with an incisive observation from [End Page 609] Horace. An average lawyer, he notes, is still a tolerable lawyer, nothing exceptional but also far from the worst. But an average artist is, in the most stringent sense, not really an artist at all. Art abhors mediocrity and insists on being extreme, original, and exceptional. Fleming situates his study in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period in which the tension between these categories becomes acute: although true art is fundamentally opposed to everything average, common, and unspectacular, art in this era increasingly turns to depictions of prosaic, everyday life. Fleming's book thus asks how there can be an art of the average, an inquiry that illuminates how art's inclusion of the unexceptional as content and audience is coupled in this period with a strenuous attempt to exclude mediocrity from artistic production. The first chapter, primarily historical, outlines the shift in the eighteenth century from a normative aesthetics based on Aristotle and Horace to a modern aesthetics of genius and originality, and it observes how this shift leads to profound changes in the aesthetic function of exemplarity and mediocrity. In normative aesthetics, exemplary works of the past provide the foundation for artistic production. To be mediocre means to deviate from the principles of those exempla, to fail to imitate them properly. The Kantian aesthetics of genius, however, turns this valuation on its head. Whereas before "mediocrity" referred to a failure to imitate great works, the criteria of genius and originality dictate that mediocre works are precisely those that do follow examples. The mediocre comes to be seen as that which is derivative and unoriginal, while the exemplary work aims to be so original that it creates a new norm by which other works will be judged. In Kant's words, genius is "the talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art" (28). The work of genius is, in this sense, exemplary, and any work that takes (rather than makes) the rules mires itself in derivative mediocrity. Either way, mediocrity falls below the status of art. Fleming traces this tension between exemplarity and mediocrity through three further instances—the average audience, the average artist, and the average life. He does more, though, than simply identify occurrences of these categories in the aesthetic discussions of the age of Goethe. In Fleming's hands, exemplarity and mediocrity become terms with remarkable explanatory power. The exchange on tragedy between Lessing, Nicolai, and Mendelssohn offers a case in point. Lessing holds that tragedy moves its audience through compassion, which rests on the audience's ability to identify with the characters' suffering. If the goal is to elicit compassion from the common or average person, it only makes sense to replace the kings and heroes of traditional tragedy with the everyday concerns of common people. Bourgeois tragedy thus turns to the mediocre to produce the deepest and broadest tragic effect. Lessing's Mitleidsdramaturgie is well-covered scholarly terrain, but Fleming's analysis adds to our understanding. He is able to use the categories of exemplarity and mediocrity to explain, for instance, why Lessing focuses solely on compassion and excludes admiration from tragedy's desired effects. The chapter on the average artist examines Goethe and Schiller's notes for a joint project on dilettantism. The dilettante represents, in their view, the threat of the average artist, the person who understands the techniques and rules of art but lacks genius. At stake in the dilettantism project is the desire to preserve genial talent from dilution at the hands of capable but derivative imitators. In other words, the dilettante's ability to produce acceptable copies in the mode of the masters calls into question any [End Page 610] clear distinction between exemplarity and mediocrity. The solution, which gets played out, as Fleming shows, in...