Lately, I’ve been wondering about who truly gains from a culture where we revere artists. A world where the artist is God, not for what he creates but merely for who he is.
It seems clear to me that the real beneficiaries could never be the artists themselves, though I am acutely aware of the widespread naivety that infects most western minds, the one that associates fame and fortune with success, that rejects the idea of money eroding the artistic process and its integrity.
If there’s a topic I’ve explored at length here—if there is one thing I know to be true— it is how fame distorts and disfigures imagination and innovation. It is an inevitability as certain as death. Once a certain ceiling is hit, the creative process is forever altered. Fame narrows perspective, shrinking the artist’s capacity to interact with and reflect the World back to us.
Parasocial manipulation turns to loyalty and devotion, successfully transferring the audience’s interest in the art itself onto the artist.
An artist does what he does because there is no other option. An artist must; an artist submits to his divine obligation. The artist is not inherently dependent on a public, a wide, fanatical audience.
The artist does not need to be seen to create.
The artist does not require feverish adoration and uncritical admirers.
And if he does?
That’s something else.
Notoriety does not benefit the artist. Instead, it works to denigrate his integrity and vision, disarming him further with every new étage of fame and success he reaches.
The actual beneficiaries of a culture that makes stars out of its artists are, of course, the “creative” industries and institutions. Collaborations with power quickly and easily fall into perversity, think Lockheed Martin or the Sackler family’s involvement in artistic endeavors.
As long as greed can be exploited, it will be. And so, we need our artists to be insecure, never satisfied, and desperate to keep their profitability up.
There is no greater void than fame. The pretend largess of celebrity status traps the artist in an awful amber.
The veneration of the artist is, above all, lucrative.
It also allows for a filtering system, in which revolutionary and principled artists are weeded out and the apolitical and spineless are rewarded with a cult of personality.
What ends up happening, regardless of whether we are referring to painters or poets, actors or authors, is that those with the least to say are rewarded with the most resources. The nothing-sayers are encouraged to keep uselessly gumming at society and celebrated for their superficial charm.
We hold artists hostage by capturing their egos and stroking them.
This system ensures both profits and an unchanging state of affairs.
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