Artists or monsters? The book shows the hateful behavior of artistic geniuses

From the anti-Semite Richard Vagner to the misogyny of Miles Davis, passing through Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, can the force of the work suppress moral transgressions?

Can man be separated from work? The issue returns to the news with each new episode. Last August the illustrious and highly esteemed English conductor John Eliot Gardiner80 years old, perforated on the face of a singer in his choir who walked off in the wrong direction after a concert. Gardiner has a long history of mistreating its musicians and singers – and the apologies in these cases are always formal. His recordings of Bach’s workmore than a hundred albums, but his reputation is very damaged.

He’s not alone. Richard Wagner he was not “appropriated” by Nazism, he was already a convinced anti-Semite, he wrote hateful texts, he seduced the king of Bavaria in exchange for the construction of his own theatre, Bayreuth. As a guy like that he revolutionized opera and wrote similar masterpieces Tristan and Isolde AND The Ring of the Nibelung?

These “monsters” are not exclusive to the musical world. A director as brilliant as Roman Polanski, for example, entered the field of rape, taking a 13-year-old girl to the home of actor Jack Nicholson more than 50 years ago. Even so, we can’t stop watching and appreciating masterpieces like Rosemary’s baby.

In your book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, released in April this year (without translation), the American writer Claire Dederer, 56, succinctly describes the misconduct and crimes of even artistic geniuses. What makes the book amazing is that she shifts the question to us, the audience, who have a love-hate relationship with Polanski, Woody Allen, Wagner, Picasso and Johnny Depp, among many other “monsters”. And he tries to explain how we manage to live with this contradiction, to love the work and hate the author.

“Can we continue to celebrate the genius in the face of the monster?”, he proposes. Consuming a work of art is the meeting of two biographies: that of the artist, “which can hinder the consumption of art”; and the biography of every person who belongs to heterogeneous public masses. Everyone reacts differently or, according to Claire, “the biography of each person in the audience shapes the view of art.” And she insists: “I repeat: this happens in all cases.”

“Audience Autobiography”

Gradually weaves together what she calls “the audience’s autobiography.” And he notes that one of the public’s biggest problems is called “the past”. A time when monstrous behavior was accepted. Polanski, convicted of rape, managed, albeit with restrictions, to continue making his films. The past is also a place where anti-Semitism, racism and misogyny were omnipresent, “where women were put in boxes like loose buttons, where abuse was normal, and if you did it you were just asserting your normality” . In short: “The past is Bing Crosby beating his kids.”

Is it enough to say that people like these were simply the product of their time and that we are better off now? Two ideas borrowed from an American writer and a British philosopher open new windows for us to understand this complicated relationship between audience and artist. What to do with the art of the monstrous people we love, across a broad spectrum of time, from Caravaggio to Michael Jackson? Eliminate them from our lives?

Better to ask ourselves which of our ambivalent feelings towards them is greater: repulsion or love? Gillian Rose, a British philosopher, wrote that “in personal life, regardless of any agreement, one party can initiate a fundamental change in the terms of the relationship without renegotiating them” (in the book The labor of love, 1995). Claire relies mostly on what she calls “necessary but unanswered questions.” Second to Claire’s bandwagon is African-American writer Pearl Cleage, now 74. Specifically in a 64-page booklet from 1990, entitled Mad at Miles: A Black Woman Driving to the Truth, in which he details the abuse Miles committed against women in his love life. Yes, the Miles in the title is the famous jazz trumpeter Miles Davis (1926-1991).

Indeed, in 2012 a bewildered Miles Davis fan asked him the following: “There are countless jazz fans who have not been able to listen to Miles Davis in the same way since reading his 1990 book, in which you detail the relationships Davis’ violence towards women. Should I continue to feel guilty for wanting to listen to his work?”

Cleage’s response: “No, you shouldn’t feel guilty. Miles is dead…. And I confess that I’ve never been able to give up listening either.” Kind of blue!” In other words, it is impossible to stop liking a song, a book, a painting, a film or a play, because the author is personally despicable or even criminal in his attitudes. “Cleage loves Miles,” writes Claire ,” and then she hates him, and then she loves him more consciously. What you can’t do is pretend that love doesn’t exist, or that it shouldn’t exist.”

More mature, Pearl Cleage’s response is still a comfort to fans: “We can only hope that the next time she comes back, her spirit and personality are as lovely as her music.”

Three monsters we love

A dedication by Wagner:

“Only friends who are interested in the Artist’s Man are capable of understanding him.”

Richard Wagner, “A Communication to My Friends” (1851)

Virginia Woolf, anti-Semite

“Why has Woolf’s anti-Semitism been forgotten? It’s not the first thing we think of when we think of her. And it’s a small thing, a casual thing, a buried thing. Just like TS Eliot, Edith Wharton and Dostoevsky, we thought before anything else in literary production. Faced with his anti-Semitism, we think of it as something that has to do with his historical moment – as if anti-Semitism were the state of mind of the time (… ) Let’s think about Woolf and the Bloomsbury group as splendid standard-bearers of liberalism. This is the version of Woolf that “won” [Claire Dederer]

Lolita: Was Nabokov a monster?

To read the book is to engage the monstrous. And surely the man who wrote the book must be a monster. But was Nabokov a monster? He is best remembered as the author of a portrait of a monster. Humbert Humbert, the child rapist, is portrayed so perfectly and completely as to confuse him with his perpetrator: only a monster could know a monster so well. Certainly Lolita it must be a sort of mirror of its author (…) He disdains the biographical approach to the life of an artist in favor of what is contained in the book: “The best part of a writer’s biography is not the account of his adventures , but the history of his style”. But why did Nabokov spend all this time with Humbert? It is a mistake to ask this question in search of a biographical answer. In other words, we must ask the question not about Nabokov as a man, but about Nabokov as an author. The only answer is the aesthetic answer.

Source: Terra

Earl

Earl Johnson is a music writer at Gossipify, known for his in-depth analysis and unique perspective on the industry. A graduate of USC with a degree in Music, he brings years of experience and passion to his writing. He covers the latest releases and trends, always on the lookout for the next big thing in music.