Ugly people can create beautiful art
Great art, whoever made it, can be ennobling. We shouldn’t rush to censor it, writes Judith Woods.
Does great art transcend morality? Or, more demotically: can we still listen to The Ronettes now we’ve all been inconveniently reminded that Phil Spector spent his last years in prison for the gratuitous murder of a young actress?
Let anyone who hasn’t felt distinctly ambivalent about listening to Thriller ,in the light of Michael Jackson’s sordid reputation, cast the first aspersion. Does the fact that Elvis had a penchant for under-age pageant queens matter, more than four decades after his demise?
It’s easier to forgive the dead. The cognitive dissonance thrown up by the living is harder to process. Can we hate sexual predator Harvey Weinstein, yet enjoy his dazzling career gems such as
Pulp Fiction and Shakespeare in Love?
Art, and the individuals who make it, often have such a profound effect on our emotional lives that discovering our idols have feet of clay, wandering hands or vile, volcanic tempers feels like a deep and highly personal betrayal.
A case in point: I joined a choir last year with another, younger, newbie who came once, looked stricken when she was handed the sheet music for The Smiths’
Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now and refused to sing it (or return) on the grounds that born-again right-wing contrarian Morrissey has aligned himself on the wrong side of the culture war.
I kind of agreed. But I said nothing, which makes me either a despicable Quisling or a grown-up with an ear for a fine tune and a melancholy sentiment.
The truth about all art is that it is impossible to erase bad people from the canon; it would be easier to expunge art itself. Easier still to peddle the myth that truly great artists are single-minded, passionate and selfish, which makes for sublime canvases, operas, compositions and creations – at the expense of likeability, empathy and fidelity.
I suspect it’s why the ‘‘flawed genius’’ concept and its darker allotrope ‘‘the tortured genius’’ were invented; they are disingenuous pleas for understanding, acknowledgment that sublime talent must take precedence over human frailty.
Otherwise murderous Caravaggio wouldn’t be hanging in the world’s most prestigious galleries, nor anti-Semitic Wagner performed in its finest opera houses. Broken marriages, neglected children and anguish are par for the course in the literary world: two of Ted Hughes’ partners took their own lives by the same method; Byron committed incest. When a philandering Charles Dickens grew tired of his long-suffering wife who had lost her looks after bearing him 10 children, he banished her from his household and tried to have her committed to an asylum.
Painters are no less reprehensible. Picasso was no feminist. Rumour – and an extensive investigation by crime writer Patricia Cornwell – has it that Victorian painter Walter Sickert was really Jack the Ripper. Do we take a wrecking ball to their legacy? Tear down their statuary in a frenzy of moral relativism? Every new generation strives to push boundaries and hold previous generations to account, through the prism of heightened modern sensibilities.
It has long been accepted that art is inextricably bound up with the artist and the wider socio-political milieu in which it was made. But no less crucial is the context in which it is viewed and value judgments made.
Great art is ennobling. Much better to censor pedestrian art; after his convictions for sexual assault, I quietly put my Rolf Harris children’s picture book in the recycling bin. His portrait of the Queen, rattled off in 2005 and displayed for a year in Buckingham Palace, has since disappeared – been disappeared – with as little trace as the princes in the Tower. Good riddance.
But to eliminate Phil Spector from the hall of fame is simply not an option. One of life’s ineluctable facts is that ugly people sometimes create beautiful things.