Is it possible to be an arts person without being ... well, a little demented? In what way does an involvement with the arts really benefit a person? It seems to me that you fall for the arts mainly because they move you. They infect and reflect your daydreams and your dreams. They give you feelings and experiences the likes of which you otherwise run across only in church or in bed. Your vulnerabilities, your sensitivities, your fantasies -- all are stimulated and engaged. FWIW, and IMHO: the best film evocation of the kind of seductive, crazy-making dream-state that a life in the arts can be like is Julian Schnabel's "Basquiat."
If the arts don't hit you in this way, then why would you bother with them at all? God knows they can be a lot of trouble -- why not lead a sensible, prosaic life instead? On the other hand, if you go too far into headlong intoxication, you can wind up self-destructing. So: How to respect the real-life-practicality we all need to survive while maintaining the openness and receptivity -- and the imaginative/emotional engagement -- that an involvement with the arts requires? Is it possible to keep your head while losing it? Most of us find some kind of bearable balance, however haphazard.
Townes Van Zandt didn't even try. Once he walked off the cliff he just kept right on falling.
I asked a Christian friend of mine who works in the film industry what she made of the Gibson fiasco. She wasn't sure what to make of it, but she did say that anybody who saw "The Passion of the Christ" could tell that it was a work that came from the soul of an artist struggling in darkness. I couldn't agree more -- which is what helped make it such a profoundly moving film. I've seen it three or four times, and it never fails to shatter me. I doubt I would feel that way if I were not a believing Christian, but I am, and as someone who has watched every Jesus film committed to celluloid (had to, for a Weekly Standard piece I did a few years ago), I can say that nothing cracked me open and ripped me apart spiritually like the Gibson version did. Nothing made me feel the enormity of what Christ suffered, and of how God Almighty permitted himself to endure unbearable pain and humiliation ... because of me and for me. No work of Christian art ever made the Incarnation as real to me. The final line of Rilke's poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" directly describes the power of mere material artistically arranged to affect the human will: You must change your life.
If Mel Gibson's intent in "The Passion of the Christ" was to turn the Christian masses against the Jews, he plainly failed. In fact, the impression I got from the film was of the tragic circumstances that the Sanhedrin and Pontius Pilate found themselves in: both of them truly thought they were doing the right thing. That's the human condition. Gibson made those old Sunday school stories come alive again. He made those exhausted narratives bleed fresh. He created a work of art.
I do wonder, along with my film industry friend, if the artist who made "The Passion of the Christ" could have done it were he not tormented by his own demons. Being a gifted artist does not give you license to be a dirtbag, or relieve you from your obligation to be moral and decent. But I think being mature means coming to understand that those who are creative often face struggles that the rest of us don't -- and that those struggles are directly tied to what makes them so creative. That's their tragedy. In the world of art, goodness and greatness don't often have a lot to do with each other.
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excellent thoughts, all.
Philip: to do italics, replace the left brace in the example below with the left carat (shift comma) and the right brace with the right carat (shift period)
{i}words you want italicized{/i}
it ends up looking like this:
words you want italicized
Very thoughtful analyses, y'all - and a good read :)>
Hey, thanks for the link to my Townes piece. I've enjoyed reading everyone's thoughts and reflections. One new thought occurs to me as I chew it over. Maybe we'd do well to worry less about artists (are they mad? do they have to be? etc), and to concern ourselves a bit more with how we take them and what we make of them? (Which I realize is coming full circle 'round to some of Rod's original points here ...)
Some questions and suggested responses: Is it wise to give over to their work? (Sure, in most cases, why not?) Is it sensible to take their lives as role-models for our own? (Probably not. We should probably expect many of them to lead fairly nutty lives that would drive many of us crazy.) Should we pay much attention to their personal behavior, and/or to what they say in their own voices? (Hmm ... Well, in most cases I'd suggest disregarding what they say in their own voices. They may be brilliant artists, but many of them are naifs, or twits, or self-dramatizers, or just plain stupid when they speak in their own voices ...)
Darn, now I've got to go and actually watch "The Passion of the Christ.">
It occurs to me at the heart of this discussion, there may be two or three competing views of the artist, though perhaps they can be combined with some tension:
1) The artist as a person of craft, constructing the well-made work that impacts and moves an audience.
2) The artist as expressivist hero, art being an outpouring of the artist's talent/genius/madness.
3)(Maybe)The "artist" as social construction--celebrity persona fashioned for the public's interest in artist as #2.
Any others I'm missing?>
Philip, I think your picture is complete. It points to something I call the aristocratic fallacy, which IMO is at the heart of the whole phenomenon.
We, as a species and inparticular in the US as a society, have this deepseated need for exalted individuals. The usual manifestation of this is the aristocracy, and since our founding pretty much put the kibosh on any sort of royalty in this country, it has been replaced by the wealthy, and recently (last 100 years or so) by entertainers. In my not so humble opinion, the televangelists, sports figures and the news media talking heads belong in that latter group.
The fallacy is that some arbitrary criterion is all that is needed to judge the worth of a person. It used to be accident of birth, bolstered by the concept of divine right. Now it's money, bolstered by the notion that money is the most important (if not sole) measure of the worth of a person.
So, when you find yourself nodding when someone says something like "she was the richest person I've ever known, and she had practically no money", remember the aristocratic fallacy, and apply it vigorously to your perception of, well, the modern replacements for the aristocracy.>
Among the hydra-headed derangements issuing from our modern age of scientistic reductionism, few are as prevalent as the quasi-Romantic, post-Renaissance image of the Artist - that member of a special class or clerisy hermetically sealed by talent and insight from the rest of us mere mortals, lonely, doomed, tormented world without end before burning out at the end of a bottle, the edge of a razor, or a bed in, er, Bedlam, his works lodged behind glass or in amber for the well-heeled to view through the eyes of those anointed professionals whose curatorial pointers are alone steady enough to unlock the canon before an audience of passive consumers, whether "unwashed" then or gentrified now.
As so often elsewhere, the neo-Platonic and Traditionalist threads within Western (and allied Eastern) traditions come as the proverbial breaths of fresh air, fortifying Harry Truman's quip asserting that "the only thing new in the world is the history you don't know". The great, charismatic and prolific Ceylonese-English philosopher of art Ananda K. Coomaraswamy did yeoman's work in this line early in the C20 (start with CHRISTIAN AND ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF ART), articulating the traditional vision of art, craft, utility and devotion as a seamless web arising within a communal matrix, transmitting through the works produced profound philosophic/religious content in ways accessible to all raised within the tradition - not just specialists (see also the collection EVERY MAN AN ARTIST edited by Brian Keeble for World Wisdom Publishers). There was nothing dumbed-down/egalitarian about it, though - the old apprentice-journeyman-master progression (think of such *Bildungsromans* as the *Wilhelm Meister* novels of Goethe) was a template across exacting practical discipline allied to mastery as well by the growing youth of the tasks within the household economy. That much of this practice was dissolved by the acids of the hyperspecialist, industrialist accelerando and the misnamed "leisure society" (i.e., harnessing oneself to our long-hours treadmills of junk work in order to afford junk products), is proverbial.
Traditionalists will in this sphere have to encounter, sooner rather than later, the life and work of William Blake, whose wholesome vision and lifework, verbal and visual, are virtually centrally-cast to explode the complacent delusions of latter-day left-bohemian/feminist and "conservative" right alike (siblings under the sap within the same tree of reductionist
scientism as they are). That Wendell Berry points to Blake in, say, "Christianity and the Survival of Creation" (online and in SEX, ECONOMY, FREEDOM AND COMMUNITY), is, as the old-school Marxian faithful would say, no accident: Blake and his wife Catherine Boucher were inseparable collaborators (he taught her to read, write and draw) over almost the whole of Blake's work (as with Wendell and Tanya Berry, e.g., Berry's "Why I am not Going to Buy a Computer", and "Feminism, the Body and the Machine", online and in WHAT ARE PEOPLE FOR?),
and the deep draughts from the wells of neo-Platonic and Christian-mystic (Boehme, Swedenborg) traditions which his work embodied have found live echo in two centuries of practice, in the work of, e.g., William Butler Yeats, the late English poet (and scholar of Blake, Coleridge, Yeats, and founder of the Temenos Academy) Kathleen Raine, the late Czeslaw Milosz, and the latter-day English composer John Tavener, to scratch the merest surface.
From the same period, Goethe's artistic classicism and attempt to overcome the mechanistic scientism gaining speed in his day via a wholistic approach to the natural world provide another wholesome escape from the neo-Romantic/technocratic delusions of our deification of Art and the Artist...but "the night wearies, and the light flickers in the lamp", to sample Oscar Wilde's "The Critic as Artist"...>
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