Tales of Twisted morality.

I'm with Matt Hayden on this one:

Frankly, I think this whole tortured artist myth has a lot to answer for. A helluva lot of cultural and artistic taste-makers and trendsetters really seem to get off on it. They'll sing the praises of an artist who is screwed up but mediocre over one who is brilliant but emotionally stable every time. If you're a performer of some kind it's a pretty good career move to have a raging drug habit and a history of failed, dysfunctional relationships. Then all your work will be seen through this "tortured artist" prism. So even if it's just some crap you cranked out in a few weeks to fulfill contractual obligations to your record label it will still be seen as some kind of brave artistic experiment that ultimately failed.

In South Africa, at the highest point in an otherwise relatively non-dramatic artistic career I was interviewed by a 'progressive', 'cutting-edge', art/design magazine for a profile. When they discovered that I was quite an ordinary family man with no (or hidden) destructive habits they declared that I was not 'interesting enough' for the magazines readership.

I know that I could have curled the interviewers toes with some less than laudable exploits during my youth (and not-so-youth!), however I chose to keep my non-salubrious actions to myself, simply because I was not proud of them. Perhaps I am a dinosaur, perhaps we should let it all hang out for every readers voyeuristic delights, perhaps the myth is worth cultivating in order to gain some more sales, goodness knows I could always use that. But I wonder about the wisdom of making a virtue out of human frailty. Amy Winehouse gives pause to the embracing of such indiscretion.

I know fellow artists who choose to live on the edge of society solely because they art in the arts. Inhabit that dimension for an extended period of time and you begin to lose sight of reality, of whats true, noble, worthy, i.e. of the truly creative. Is it any wonder therefore that so much artwork today celebrates ugly, destructive and rotten. Perfectly respectable youngsters would arrive at the university to study art and within months they would be transformed into anti-social misfits whose raison detre appeared to be destruction as opposed to creativity.

Many, too many young lives have been negatively impacted and possibly wasted as a result of this false worldview. Perhaps the era of the anonymous painter/designer/sculptor should be the one thing to be hauled out of the closet again.

UPDATE:  22.11.2011
Even though we live in an image saturated and artistically prolific culture, interest in the 'fine arts' is lukewarm at best, and generally restricted to the few...most of whom don't even have a clue whats going on but enjoy the 'frisson' of being part of the 'elite', thereby reinforcing the Emperors' clothes myth.
The Australian reports on how even Aunty ABC has abandoned the arts:

Yet the attitude persists that arts journalism is somehow indulgent, unimportant and dispensable, attracting too few readers or viewers to warrant the media space.

ABC1 is dropping Art Nation, its only general-interest arts magazine, because it costs $2 million a year to produce and attracts only 60,000 viewers.

The broadcaster also has scrapped two of its specialist cultural programs on Radio National, The Book Show and Artworks, and rolled books and arts into a single daily program.

Reality has a way of slapping down the Utopianist and all of the the hand-wringing, pathos laden, anti-everything, immoral, insane vibe of post modern art has eventually tired even the most hardened of viewers, leaving only those directly involved in the game...the last, thin foundation. Unfortunately such a scenario falls well within the definition of a cultural collapse which, as history indicates, often signals the end of the beginning of general civilizational implosion.

No doubt the 'arty' elites will scream 'phillistines' at the uncaring mob and in the sheltered niche cafes and green enclaves they will excoriate all whose tastes do not match their own jaded, often twisted perspectives on 'artistic sensibilities'.

And the world will continue to turn.