The artist as moral monster. Misogynist. Misanthrope. For some it’s been a serviceable paradigm. Think of Gauguin, who abandoned his wife and five children (at his exasperated wife’s request) in order to stretch his canvases, and his moral sense, under the Polynesian sun.
There were one or two drawbacks to the business plan, however. Gauguin deeply hurt those he had once held so dear and didn’t even begin to return a profit until after he was dead.
One can’t deny that the moral monster route has produced some masterpieces, but at what human cost? The Romantic artist thinks that the creative Muse demands that the artist distort his own dignity and ignore that of others. Yet the fascinating and surprising fact is that very opposite is true.
As I noted in my last post, Pixar president Ed Catmull’s lifelong study of collaborative creativity reveals that creativity flourishes best when human beings are allowed to be their most human, when their inherent dignity is attended to and they are able to exercise their powers–all their powers, intellectual, moral, physical–in ways that lead to those excellences that in saner times were called the virtues.
Seth Godin, in the Icarus Deception, confirms this point when he observes that art in our connection economy thrives when human dignity, of both artist and audience, is respected, prized, brought to fulfillment.
The way of Gauguin and Lord Byron is always available. But even leaving the moral shortcomings aside, it’s a way out of step with the way in which artists today really connect with their audiences.
