What you say is blah blah sociology and the fictions of art history myth-making. As you know I've been around artists for 50 years and sometimes I think I hired half of them at one time or another and talked to all of them at least once, at a bar, at a gallery, on the street, where honesty is the rule. I never met an artist who was as normal as a salesman or business manager, etc., because no artist I ever met was happy with the status quo. For them, something is wrong in River City, always. They can be angered or just cynical, or cleverly amused, but they are out of synch with the general population, that's for sure. Show me a perfectly happy, well adjusted artist who also is just fine and dandy with the real world -- meaning accepting and benign -- and I'll show you a bad artist, one who is content to be mediocre, IS mediocre, and simply takes up artist links in the great chain of being. Coming from comfortable circumstances has nothing to do with one's adjustment to life and society. Actually the reality may be the other way around. Kids who grow up "comfortably" under rich or famous or highly professional parents often have the toughest time trying to find their own way while kids from more ordinary circumstances, even impoverished and unloved, do better because by any measure they see around them early on, they are better. They can easily beat the measures they know. Actually, I think there are studies out there to show that most artists nowadays come from middle-upper-middle class families. I say they are stressed, emotionally edgy, maladjusted to a insane society that any thinking person must keep at arm's length. They are the sane ones and the society is nuts. But since they are the minority with respect to values, taste, power, wealth, they are the weird ones. My pal Ed Paschke used to say he'd have become a criminal if he hadn't been lucky enough to be an artist. I felt the same way.
wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Fri, June 11, 2010 6:00:36 PM Subject: Re: "'What makes one an artist?' This issue is never raised in the post-art world..." William > I my subjective view, two things make the artist. One is art, as the article states. The other is some trauma that disabled the future artist to be fully comfortable with society and thus to be somewhat maladjusted -- an outsider to some degree. As the person matures, art becomes the way to try to renegotiate a place in society --- as an artist. "Tears of a clown" kind of thing? It doesn't ring true as a universal or general truth (although, on a case by case basis, it might well apply to any individual artist). I don't think the premise is reliable, the outsider trying to find his or her place in society. How does that theory account for good artists who come from comfortable families and encounter little "trauma" in life? I believe what you describe is a myth popularized in the mid-nineteenth century, coming after a couple of generations of ever-increasing democratization of Western societies, the weakening of aristocratic and ecclesiastical ascendancy, and the widespread effects of industrialization--which included spreading literacy and general education. What happened in the nineteenth century was analogous to the effects of the Protestant Reformation: the repudiation of central authority (the Universal Church or l'Ecole des Beaux Arts), the assertion of private interpretation (of scripture or of aesthetics), the assault by outside knowledge on authority (Copernican and Galilean astronomy or the geological-Darwinian-Rutherfordian new knowledge). Social powers and authorities have always allowed a measure of behavior outside the bounds, from the Dionysian festivals to the court fool who speaks boldly to the monarch. These weren't artists, and the great works of the centuries weren't the products of outsiders and rogue creators. The inscrutable or irascible artist is the stereotype of popular twentieth century popular psychology and cultural anthropology. "I can do it any way I like" is more the manifesto of an aesthetic protestant than of a traumatized outsider. Side note: I've been fascinated for many years by the different preferences people have, preference of what they like to eat and wear, the ideas and stories they entertain, the work and diversions they choose. What is to account for the fact that one person chooses to learn and master an art and another person chooses clerical work and yet another chooses bookkeeping or driving trucks or being a salesman? | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
