Georg Baselitz died at 88 this week, and the obituaries could not agree on what to do with him. Artnet called him a Neo-Expressionist pioneer who upended German art. Hyperallergic called him a purveyor of the tortured male genius myth with distorted views on women artists. Both are correct. His death arrives exactly when investor Gokul Rajaram predicted, via TurboFund's Signal Report, that 2026 marks the end of product design as a standalone profession, the first creative role to be structurally eliminated by AI. The timing is not coincidental. It is a cultural pressure point.
The Tortured Genius Myth as Competitive Moat
Baselitz's career was built on the idea that artistic authority flows from individual suffering, biography, and irreproducible interiority. This is the same argument that industrial designers, UX leads, and creative directors have used for decades to justify their role in product pipelines: only a human with taste, with an eye, with vision, can make the call. The Rajaram signal does not say AI has taste. It says taste has been operationalized sufficiently that the institutional role protecting it is no longer economically necessary. Isabel Nolan's interview ahead of Venice is a useful counterpoint. Nolan has aphantasia, she cannot visualize images mentally, and she argues this makes her work more honest, less beholden to the inner cinema of romantic genius. Her condition strips away exactly what Baselitz mythologized.
Creativity After the Role Is Gone
The question that Baselitz's dual obituary opens up is the one AI is forcing across every creative field: was the genius the work, or was it the certification system around the work? Conductor Art Fair's debut in Brooklyn, explicitly framed as a platform for the global majority underrepresented in biennial circuits, suggests one answer. Decentralize the credentialing and the myth dissolves. AI's elimination of the product design role is the industrial version of the same dissolution. TurboFund's seed-stage AI investor list shows where capital is flowing into the tools doing the dissolving. Whether that is liberation or loss depends entirely on who was protected by the myth in the first place.