The Eucharistic Artist

There is a popular idea that artistic genius demands the martyrdom of the artist; that by cutting off one’s ear the product will benefit. The artist is expected to live in a state of perpetual pain and frustration, struggling with the fickle muse inside him, agonizing over the inability to express the beauty within him. Art is born of work, not divine intervention. Thus the cliché: genius is one-percent inspiration, 99% perspiration. And to attempt to produce something of beauty while being riddled with personal problems is not an easy task. In the end, the work suffers.

Western art during the 20th century has been driven by the idea that craziness is next to godliness. Drug abuse, schizophrenia and life in the fast lane have been unanimously accepted as the secret to artistic success. At the cutting edge of this trend were artists like Toulouse-Lautrec who drank himself into oblivion and Van Gogh who, almost always in a state of depression and often in a state of debauchery, ended up killing himself. Later came Kafka—“I intentionally walk through the streets where there are whores”—followed by the Surrealists with their equivocal respect for the criminally insane. And to mention the rock stars of the 1960s is to belabor the point.

It is time to wake up to the hard, cold reality that men who frequent prostitutes are no more creative than the rest of us. The decadent lifestyles of these artists did not benefit, but hinder their product. Yes, this is to say that what has been called innovative during the past century is all-too-often second rate. Indeed, expressly primitive images existed before the Post-Impressionists made their mark on art. The difference was that such art was not accepted in museums and salons. The reason Van Gogh couldn’t sell any painting during his lifetime was not because he was misunderstood. It was because he was bad. For ethical art requires work, which in turn demands patience, and alcoholics usually lack this virtue.

To glorify hoodlums, drunkards and drug addicts as misunderstood geniuses is to pursue a dangerous delusion. How often we forget that for every whacked-out genius there are a dozen businessmen pushing the career along. In this sense, the Eucharistic artist truly becomes the martyr he aspires to be. The irony is that he is the sacrificial lamb of an industry indifferent to artistic sensibility. Even more tragic is the public who naively believes the wild exploits and fatal mistakes were part and parcel to the success. The young at heart and weak of mind blindly mimic the artistic martyr not realizing that copy cats don’t possess the same charm.