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In France, there has long been talk— not without irony— of the“ children of the trade” in the film industry— those directors and actresses whose last names opened doors that it would have taken a complete unknown ten years, or even an entire career, just to crack open. It is no coincidence that so many names recur, generation after generation, in the credits of the same productions. In the world of contemporary art, a study of New York galleries showed that the vast majority of artists exhibited in the most influential galleries had attended a very small number of art schools, which were themselves disproportionately attended by the children of collectors, dealers, or already established artists.
Flashmag! Issue 177 October 2026
Even in music— a world reputed to be more open to raw talent— official biographies often omit a crucial detail: that first, decisive connection. The producer met by chance who happens to be a friend of an uncle’ s. The label that agrees to listen to a demo because a sound engineer put in a good word behind the scenes. These aren’ t lies— they’ re omissions. And these omissions, repeated a thousand times in a thousand different stories, eventually build a collective myth: that of the spontaneous generation of talent.
Spontaneous generation does not exist
In biology, the theory of spontaneous generation— the idea that life could arise from nothing, without any prior cause, that flies could spontaneously emerge from rotting meat— was definitively disproved by Louis Pasteur in the 19th century through his famous swan-neck flask experiments. Nothing comes from nothing: every living organism is the product of a preceding organism, of a lineage, of transmission.
It seems that the same is true of social success. The“ self-made man,” the iconic figure of the American Dream popularized as early as the 19th century by authors such as Horatio Alger, is more of a founding myth than a statistical reality.
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