Just why are artists nuts?

Are artists nuts?

The rest of the country seems to agree, yes. But they aren’t artists are they?

There are so many myths about what an artist’s life is like that sorting the truth from fiction is hard to do. For one thing, fiction is so much better, beautiful, nekkid woman lounging on furs while the Avant-garde artist mixes his pallet and using his thumb as a substitute gun site creates scandalous, seductive, graphic porn!

Yeah, right. This assumes that all artists are lecherous men and ignores the fact that well over half of all working artists in this country are women. And women just don’t letch, okay, yes they sometimes do, but usually it involves Brad Pitt and not some nekkid woman, unless you are willing to believe the other big myth, artist’s are all sexually promiscuous and gender confused.

Let’s try one thing at a time; most artists working today seldom do nudes. You’ve heard me whine about the lack of people in art at shows and the lack of people in art for sale and the lack of people in art because people don’t like having strange people hanging around on their walls. No where does this exempt nekkid people. People are still people whether they have on clothes or not and around these parts they just don’t get painted.

The rest of the BIG MYTH is so obvious it makes me wonder of these are the folks who watch Ghost Hunters, a television show in which nothing but whispering happens hour after hour. Get serious, central heat is a new invention, relatively. Until the later part of the nineteenth century most places were heated by fireplace, which means one side warm the other Birdseye. If you, male or female can talk a beautiful woman into getting starkers in a room where meat can sit out without fear of spoilage you shouldn’t be doing art, you need to be a lawyer or televangelist and make some big money! Women generally have more brains than men and do not as a rule get naked in a deep freeze.

And while we are at it lets talk just a minute about the beautiful part. Now I am a huge advocate of using real people in art, people who are not air brushed within an inch of becoming anime, but for most of our known history there has been a gigantic social prohibition against any kind of semi-public nudity. Nice girls don’t, (Until of course folks like Paris Hilton made getting naked a career move), and even not so nice girls don’t and in fact even rotten girls don’t which leaves…professional girls.

Yes, that means exactly what you think it means and that is where ninety percent of artist’s models came from, right off the corner and into the studio. Modeling had much better hours than streetwalking and the perks were better, only one letch to deal with, bathrooms in studio, even if that was an enameled pot behind a curtain and food. Yes, traditionally models worked for food and money and didn’t give a hoot about Fine Art.

And just how did all those nekkid-painting Bohemian artists come by their studios? They had patrons. A patron is much like an absolute dictator without so much social consciousness. They saw what, when and where you will work and for how long and if you don’t believe that read Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy.

So much for free-wheeling, licentiousness and wild chandelier swinging parties ‘round the old Sistine Chapel. Sure some artists did have affairs with their models and some artists batted for the other side and so have some Congressmen and you don’t hear a word about how crazy they are!

So forget about it! That part of the BIG MYTH is just so much apple sauce.

I think it begins in public school, the longest, established concentration camp system not condemned by the Geneva Convention.

See there is no more hostile, rigid, structured society than found in the typical high school. Geek, Nerd, Dweeb and a host of unprintable others all leveled at anyone not exactly like everyone else. Try being a happy artist in that climate. They’ll surround you, isolate you and drive you straight for the cliff the lemmings aren’t using.

Who makes up these rules? The ones who fit, that’s right, the ones who fit have the most to lose and the most to protect. They are the arbiters of all things high school. And they come down with the hammer if you don’t go along with the program.

Now let’s say you’re an artist, only you don’t know it. Maybe it takes twenty or thirty years to find out that what you were meant to do is create fine art. They’ll let you pace yourself and find the things which bring meaning to your life. Not on this planet, anything which upsets the established order like someone who can’t be fit in a neat little box had better get with the program or get on the road.

But after four miserable years you get your reprieve and graduate and join the larger society where things will be so much better.

Not a chance. Those same people who haunted, harassed and hate you in school have become the bankers, legislators, judges and policefolk of the country and they haven’t changed or forgotten a thing. They still think you’re a dork.

They also become talking heads because as we now being pretty is much more important to the news than being smart. And with rare exceptions they bring their own mythology to the tube. Those cheerleaders and football heroes of yester year don’t like anyone they can’t put on the shelf.

Now I have nothing against footballers and cheerleaders, I was a football player myself, while I was flailing around trying to figure out what I was going to be when I grew up, and sure I had some pretty rigid notions about what sort of people should be catching the headlines. Trouble was I did eventually grow up.

I never really liked Rock’n’Roll, couldn’t stand the Beatles and Elvis makes me want to drive red-hot nails into my ears. I liked jazz, you know, the divine Ella, Big Bands and Hoagie Carmichael’s immortal Stardust and for many, many years I thought there was something wrong with me. See a lot of folks told me so along with the Dweeb/Nerd word.

Took a while but I finally found out that there are a bunch of other people just like me who love jazz and aren’t so crazy for Rock.

And that’s where the lesson is for today class; when you hear someone say “All artists are crazy…” consider the source.