What is the popular conception of the artist? Gathering a thousand descriptions, and the resulting composite is the portrait of a moron: he is held to be childish, irresponsible, and ignorant or stupid in everyday affairs.
The picture does not necessarily involve censure or unkindness. These deficiencies are attributed to the intensity of the artist's preoccupation with his/her particular kind of fantasy and to the unworldly nature of the fantastic itself. The bantering tolerance granted to the absentminded professor is extended to the artist. Biographers contrast the artlessness of his/her judgments with the high attainment of his/her art, and while his/her naivety or rascality are gossiped about, they are viewed as signs of Simplicity and Inspiration, which are the Handmaidens of Art. And if the artist is inarticulate and lacking in the usual repositories of fact and information, how fortunate, it is said, that nature has contrived to divert from him/her all worldly distractions so he/she may be single-minded in regards to the their special office.
The myth, like all myths, has many reasonable foundations. First, it attests to the common belief in the laws of compensation: that one sense will gain in sensitivity by the deficiency in another. Homer was blind, Beethoven was deaf. Too bad for them, but fortunate for us in the increased vividness of their art. But more importantly it attests to the persistent belief in the irrational quality of inspiration, finding between the innocence of childhood and the derangements of madness that true insight which is not accorded to normal man. When thinking of the artist, the world still adheres to Plato's view, expressed in Ion in reference to the poet: "There is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him." Although science, with scales and a yardstick, daily threatens to tear mystery from the imagination, the persistence of this myth is the inadvertent homage which we pay to the penetration of the artist's inner being as it is differentiated from his/her reasonable experience.
Strange, but the artist has never made a fuss about being denied those estimable virtues others would not do without: intellectuality, good judgment, a knowledge of the world, and rational conduct. It may be charged that he/she has even fostered the myth.
Most societies of the past have insisted that their own particular evaluations of truth and morality be depicted by the artist. Accordingly, the Egyptian artist had to produce a definitely prescribed prototype; the Christian artist had to abide by the tenets of the Second Council of Nicea or be anathematized or, like the monk of the iconoclast age, work in danger and by stealth. We should note that Michelangelo's nudes were forced to wear, in the end, the appropriate drapery. Authority formulation rules, and the artist complied. We should not speak here of those whose daring periodically revitalized art. saving it from its narcissistic mimicry of itself. We can accurately say that, within these periods, the artist had to submit to these rules or simulate the appearance of submission, if he were to be permitted to practice his art.
The artist's lot is the same today, that the market, through its denial or affording of the means of sustenance, exerts the same compulsion. Yet there is this vital difference: the civilizations enumerated above had the temporal and spiritual power to summarily enforce their demands. The Fires of Hell, exile, and, in the background, the rack and stake, were correctives if persuasion failed. Today the compulsion is Hunger, and the experience of the last four hundred years has shown us that hunger is not nearly as compelling as the imminence of Hell and Death. Since the passing of the spiritual and temporal patron, the history of art is the history of men who, for the most part, have preferred hunger to compliance, and who have considered the choice worth-while. And choice it is, for all the tragic disparity between the two alternatives.
What abetted the artists in their little game was the dogmatic unity of their civilization. For all dogmatic societies have this in common: they know what they want. Whatever the contentions behind the scenes, society is allowed only one Official Truth. The demands made upon the artist issued from a single source, and the specifications for art were definite and unmistakable. That, at least, was something; whether submission or deceit were intended, one master is better than ten, and it is better to know the size and shape of the hand that holds the whip.
Today instead of once voice we have dozens issuing demands. There is no longer one truth, no single authority - instead there is a score of would-be-masters who would usurp their place. All are fill of histories, statistics, proofs, demonstrations, facts, and quotations. First they plead and exhort, and finally they resort to intimidation by threats and moral imprecations. Each pulls the artist this way and that, telling them what he/she must do if he/she is to have a full belly and a saved soul.
For the artist, now, there can be neither compliance nor circumvention. It is the misfortune of free conscience that it cannot be neglectful of means in the pursuit of ends. Ironically enough, compliance would not help, for even the artist should to subvert this conscience, where could they find the peace in this Babel? To please one it to antagonize the others. And what security is there in any of these wrangling contenders?
The ancient truths of India, Egypt, Greece spanned over centuries. In matters of art our society has substituted taste for truth - which changes tastes as frequently as night and day. And here might the artist, placed between choice and diversity, raise his/her lamentations louder. Never did his/her protestors or masters have as many shapes or such a jabbering of voices, and never did they exude such a prolixity of matter.
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