How Do You Separate the Artist From Their Art?

Stringer, who is a frequent reader and commenter on this blog, sent in this fascinating question, and I decided to address it in a separate post. As a scholar of Hispanic literature, I have to analyze and teach works of art whose authors often hold beliefs that I find to be deeply repugnant. 

Take, for example, Francisco de Quevedo, a 17th century Baroque poet from Spain. The guy was a rabid anti-Semite and a profound woman-hater, and we all know how much I adore these particular qualities in people. From what I have been able to gather about him, Quevedo was an extremely nasty human being. At the same time, he wrote the kind of poetry that is so indescribably beautiful that no matter how many times I read it, I never cease to be amazed with it. His poem "Love Constant Beyond Death" (it's really not the same in the English translation, but here you have it anyway) touches me so deeply that I even avoid reading it. I'm not a touchy-feely-weepy kind of person, but I know that I will not be able to get my emotions under control if I start discussing it in class. You can write a doctoral dissertation on every single line of this poem and still never exhaust its meaning. It is so annoying that this nasty woman-hater and vile anti-Semite had to be the person who created my most favorite poetry in the entire world.

Then, we have Juan Goytisolo. He is not only my favorite novelist but also one of my main research interests. His novel Count Julian makes my heart stop every time I read it because it's so good. And yet, Goytisolo has written extremely nasty stuff about women in this very novel that I love so much. 

So how do I deal with this? How do I reconcile myself to the realization that some of my most favorite writers whose work I dedicate my life to studying and teaching are often jerks whose ideas I detest? How do I deal with the fact that whenever I meet writers whose work I love, I always discover that I don't enjoy spending even five minutes in their company? I thought long and hard about this and about the nature of artistic production. I know that people will criticize me for romanticizing the creative process, but I believe that artists (just artists, not literary critics, bloggers, journalists, or anybody else) get their creative gift from a place that has nothing to do with their personalities, their foibles, their vices, and their often extremely silly political beliefs. A creative genius (yes, you can laugh now, I don't mind) is something that gets bestowed on a person by nature or whatever it is you believe in for no particular reason whatsoever. 

I don't think that I'm "talented" or that any of the leading scholars in my field are "talented." (Just try calling me "talented" or "gifted" and you'll get me to become you enemy forever.) They are just extremely hard-working, dedicated, stubborn, and passionate individuals. Artists, however, are a different thing. You often see a person who is a nasty, lazy, condescending jerk who, for some unfathomable reason, has been given the gift of creating art. There is no reason for this. It just happens. (At some point, I will also blog about how scary it is to discover that a person you've known forever also has this terrifying creative gift that seems to come from nowhere.) Whenever I encounter works of art created by people I cannot possibly respect, I just look at their artwork as something that comes from a mysterious place and that, by pure chance, gets channeled through them.

Work of Art: The Next Great Artist: A Review

If you can create a reality TV show where people compete over who makes the best plate of food, the best outfit, and the best room decor, why not create a show where people compete over who makes the best work of art? Because a work of art is not the same as a plate of pasta or a pair of pants? Says who? Sarah Jessica Parker, the producer of the new Bravo show Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, believes that great artists churn out their creations like pancakes.


I know that an artist's life is hard, but why anybody with any artistic pretensions would agree to participate in this utter indignity of a show is mind-boggling. Just like in any show of the Top Chef / Project Runway variety, artists in Work of Art: The Next Great Artist are expected to produce a new work of art each week. They are given a challenge to create something that shows their "range" (huh?). The tasks go from painting a portrait to making an installation. Of course, the assignments are formulated in a very "Sarah Jessica Parker meets Jessica Simpson" kind of way. To give just one example, before the artists proceed to create a portrait the show's hostess announces self-importantly that a good portrait "reflects the inner essence of the subject." Yeah, and I guess good literature is supposed to provide a moral lesson and/or reflect reality. Evidently, for some people even the twentieth century hasn't begun yet, let alone the twenty-first.


The judges have a daunting task, indeed. To decide which work is "better" while obviously having no criteria that would facilitate such a judgement isn't easy. That's why they end up making completely inane statements like “There’s no excuse for a bad painting.” What does that even mean, exactly? To make the show even more like Project Runway (which is a show I like quite a bit), there is a person who is supposed to walk by the artists while they are working and offer advice (check the show out yourselves if you don't believe me.) This person makes statements like "My approach to art is purely physical. I normally know within the first split second whether it’s a great work or not.” Whether the show will end up discovering a decent artist remain to be seen. What is already obvious, however, is that it will have no trouble producing droves of self-important and pompous judges of art.


In his The Man Without Content, Giorgio Agamben talks about the changes
that took place in the way we see art and artists. Creating art is now seen as just another occupation, where one is expected to demonstrate wonders of unstoppable productivity. If a used car salesperson works a 40-hour week and is expected to sell a certain number of cars per month, why shouldn't an artist's creative labor be structured in the same way? If a chef should be equally comfortable with making poached eggs, short rib, or a dessert, why shouldn't an artist demonstrate a similar versatility? 


Of course, the artists who agree to submit themselves a show based on these ideas are either so browbeaten by the hardships of artistic existence that they have no personality left, or are simply no artists at all. This is why the show turned out to be excruciatingly boring.

Unenlightened

Because of my post on the amazing Mochica art, some unenlightened people banned my blog from online catalogues for being "pornographic." Now I feel like I need to add even more indecent images:





If we recognize Goya, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Morisot, and Botticelli as art (and not pornography), then why shouldn't we extend the same courtesy to the Mochicas?

Mochica Ceramics

The great Mochica culture existed on the Northern coast of Peru between I-VI centuries. They are especially famous for their knowledge of hydraulic engineering and their amazing mastery of the art of ceramics.

They are especially famous for their beautiful erotic pottery.