Hey, Matthew, big love for you, but I think you're slightly off-key (although, you know, wholly valid) in your perceptions of what you are responding to.
Near as this humble footsoldier of hope can tell, my brother Mecca is drawing attention in his quote to three separate threads of debate.
1) Art and gender
2) Art and class
3) The concept of genius
The first point is that men are traditionally indulged in behaving in eccentric ways and still held up as artists - Richard Dadd might be a good example of this one, or indeed William Blake, whose belief that he was in constant spiritual communion with the spirit of his dead brother, his tendency to hang around naked and his complex, unchristian theology might well have been considered signs of simple madness in a woman of the time are instead taken as proofs of his remarkable vision. A contemporary example (and, hey, so many of you cats know far more about modern art than I do) might be Tracey Emin, who is often decried as an emotionally unstable, dangerous lunatic for her art and her behaviour when, say, Marc Quinn (who freezes his own bodily fluids) or Damien Hirst (who actively seeks out the company of Alex James and Keith Allen) are just held up as either fraudsters or visionaries, depending on what you think of their art, but never dangerous lunatics. I mean, Gilbert and George? Two elderly men who never leave each other's sides and are into shit, piss and dystopian buttocks? Pretty crazy scene, but people talk about presentation or self-creation as art rather than being an insane pair of frustrated smallholders with a lunatic fixation on bodily functions.
2) Is basically the same argument - that ideas of art favour the middle classes. This may partly be because they exist in a peer group which indulges them (and should the working class become more tolerant, or the middle class less so?), but also, I guess Home is arguing, because the allowances for abnormal behaviour are broader among the bourgeois. So it's OK to paint your arse blue as long as you have been to art college first. It might be interesting to compare and contrast middle-class and working-class artists (if one is allowed to remain middle-class when being an artist), to see whether the latter are more hard-nosed and non-eccentric. Hmmmm...
3) I think the question here revolves around the nature of artistic creation. IIRC, Byron and the English romantics often spoke of creation as something which moved through them, "genius" as a transcendent quality which they acted as a lightning rod for - the classic example being Coleridge maintaining against all the odds that he knocked down Kublai Khan in a trice after being visited by inspiration in a dream, and would have written more at the same clip if he had not been interrupted.
Goethe, conversely (and stop me if I'm getting all confused), spoke of creation as a process of gestation. But in a sense this is a similarly individualistic view - alone among males, artists are able to hold the seed of inspiration in their bellies and "bring it to term" - a response to their inability to produce children? Hey, children - aren't they just the coolest little people? And so wise...
Sorry, got distracted. Anyhow, these ideas of genius, of an operating spirit unique to certain individuals, can be seen as elitist in the extreme, allowing those who are decided to have it to pull up the ladder under them, and also allowing them to behave badly or madly or dangerously to know and then claim that their possession of genius demands that they be judged differently to others, say women and members of the working classes, who cannot be seen as having access to this quality.
Another way to look at it might be that art is a skill or craft like many others. Some people are diposed by nature or nurture to be better at it just as some are better at maths or football, and some of those will, with time and practise, produce really good stuff. There could be child prodigies, just as Michael Owen became a top footballer earlier in his career than Bobby Charlton, but they may just be showing their aptitude much earlier. But there is nothing intrinsically magical about this, or anything intrinsically male or intrinsically middle-class, except that as a class, middle-class men have traditionally had more time and been more indulged than many other groups.
Oh, and it's a fairly major assumption to assume that the purpose of art, and thus the quality of artistic genius, lies in its ability to move people. And, when you assume, you make an ASS of U and ME... |
