Bad artists as saints, great artists as monsters

Mined from the notebooks Sunday, May 6, 2018. Posted Wednesday night, May 20, 2020.

I wonder if I’d appreciate this statue more if I didn’t know who’d sculpted it: Close-up of “Perseus With the Head of Medusa” by Benvenuto Cellini. Circa 1545-1554. Loggia dei Lanzi in the Piazza della Signoria, Florence. Via Wikipedia.

Another note from the Department of In Search of Lost Time: Sunday, May 6, 2020…

[More mining of the notebooks from May of 2018. Mrs M was asleep or unconscious most of the five weeks she was in Westchester Med, which left me a lot of time alone with my thoughts. I didn’t write it down, but I’m pretty sure I know what---who---prompted these thoughts. Not going to get into it here. There’s no point in re-opening that argument. But the thoughts I was rehashing are old ones, going back to high school when I first learned Ernest Hemingway wasn’t a nice guy and Scott Fitzerald wasn’t much better.]

Artists do it as a matter of course, separate themselves from their own art. Aspects of their personality and character seep in, but what dominates in the bar or at a party or at home or in the bedroom disappear when the artist sits down at the keyboard, steps up to the easel, takes up their bow or fingers the frets on their axe, gets behind or in front of a camera, walks out onto a stage. Forget the monsters and angels. The timid, fragile, and broken become heroes, the reticent fearlessly outspoken. The placid and good-natured turn angry and ferocious. The saintly let loose demons and devils on the world.

It’s as common for a bad person with an ugly soul and a dark heart to create beautiful art as the good and godly to create bad art. Happens all the time. Has happened throughout time. In fact, the latter more often than the former and far, far more often than a good person creating great art. Which happens. But not necessarily because the artist is a good person with a heart of gold.

It's almost impossible to see a work of art for itself. We see other things in a work of art on top of or along with the work itself. One of the things we see is a mirror.

A work of art can take us out of ourselves or sink us deeper into ourselves. Neither effect is good or bad in itself; neither actually says something definitive about the work itself or about the artist.

Knowing about this or that about the artist can get in the way or it can help us understand or give us something else to look at. It can reveal something about the art or it can obscure it. Just as the work may or may not tell us important truths about the artist, the artist may or may not tell us important truths about their work. He may be a liar or a dope. She may not know. She may still be working it out in her own head. Works of art come into the world scarce half-made up.

According to Cellini himself, he was a terrible human being. Part of his terribleness was that he wasn’t the least bit guilty about it. I read Cellini’s autobiography in grad school. Until then, to me, he was only a name on a list of Italian Renaissance sculptors who weren’t Michelangelo. I couldn’t have told you which works were his. Now I can’t look at his sculpture without “seeing” him being terrible. But I wonder what I’d think if I’d known and loved his work before I read his book.

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Update resulting from some coincidental and serendipitous reading, May 20, 2020: This is from Michael Shelden’s biography of George Orwell, which I happened to have started reading Monday:

The rich complexity of [Orwell’s] character makes him a fascinating subject for a biography. But was opposed to the idea and said so in his will. He gave no reason. His widow, Sonia...had her opinions, one of which was, “He believed there is nothing about a writer’s life that is relevant to a judgment of his work.” He thought that a writer’s aesthetic merits and moral behavior should be judged separately, as he explained in an easy on Salvador Dali: “One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other.”

Filed under Mining the Notebooks. Related reading: "Orwell the Failure".

Comments

[Cathie from Canada]

Harvey Weinstein. Woody Allen. Bill Cosby. Michael Jackson. Louis CK. And many more. Such talent, such ego.
The world is going to miss the art they can no longer produce - though it is harder to appreciate even what they already accomplished because of the stench their names emit.

[sinned34]

I do have a difficult time separating the artist from their crimes. I have a difficult time watching movies with Kevin Spacey in them, realizing he was a pedophile. Same thing with listening to Michael Jackson's music. When I hear a Pantera song (they wrote many of my favorite songs from the 90s), I also hear Philip Anselmo saying metal is a "white person thing". When I watch or play anything related to the Cthulhu mythos, I remember that the fear of the other expressed by H.P. Lovecraft was based in pure, adulterated racism.
Maybe it's better to not think about it, but I'd rather spend my money on things where I'm not paying terrible people. Although that's probably impossible to achieve.