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Art maketh the man
Jul. 4th, 2014 10:49 amI was listening to the Today programme the other day, bringing myself up to date with the important morning news in the hope that something interesting might have happened like Martians landing and disintegrating Gordon Brown with a beam of white-hot radiation but, alas, all I got was Thought for the day. Rashly I didn't leap across the room shouting Noooooooooo in slow motion and hit the off button, but instead listened to a rather rubbish and waffly fellow trying to make some sort of point.
He was telling a clearly made up story about how only the day before he'd encountered a small child singing Two Little Boys and had to tell him to stop as he "wasn't supposed to sing that song any more". Leaving aside the annoying smugness of someone telling a small child to stop singing, I say the story was clearly made up because
1) The number of children under the age of 10 who know the lyrics to a song forty years old is a vanishingly small proportion of the population - it'd be like me knowing the words to Minnie the Moocher when I was eight - and
2) The statistical probability of encountering one of them within 24 hours of Rolf Harris being banged up is pretty remote, I'd say.
So we're left with the edifying spectacle of a man of the cloth making up a story about him bullying a small child because he couldn't think of any other way to introduce his point - which was whether the works of an artist can be, or should be, divorced from their actions.
Certainly there have been several news articles about galleries removing Rolf Harris' work from display; he was, for several years in the early 1990s, Britains most bankable artist and one suspects that a lot of people are now gazing disconsolately at was once a valuable potential family heirloom on the living room wall and wondering whether just to stick it in the loft and have done. I'm guessing the portrait of the Queen Harris did is no longer in the gallery at Buck House.
But it does raise the question: to what extent can or should the works of an artist be divorced from their actions? The most obvious case is Eric Gill, whose sculptures decorate the front of the BBC's Broadcasting House, but whose personal life doesn't bear examination in what is a family blog. Suffice to say you wouldn't have wanted to be a member of his family. Or one of his pets.
Then there was Rousseau, who put his own children into an orphanage to free up time to write down his brilliant and necessary ideas; John Lennon, who knocked both his wives around; Caravaggio, who murdered someone; and Woody Allen, whose private life was so scandalous he had to move to France. There's a very long list of artists who have created what at least some consider to be great works but who were downright loathsome in their private lives.
So, seeing as how it's Friday and nobody does any work on Fridays, that's the question for today: To what extend can, or should, the life of the artist be considered distinct from their works? Or should we just quietly dispose of their art when the truth comes out?
He was telling a clearly made up story about how only the day before he'd encountered a small child singing Two Little Boys and had to tell him to stop as he "wasn't supposed to sing that song any more". Leaving aside the annoying smugness of someone telling a small child to stop singing, I say the story was clearly made up because
1) The number of children under the age of 10 who know the lyrics to a song forty years old is a vanishingly small proportion of the population - it'd be like me knowing the words to Minnie the Moocher when I was eight - and
2) The statistical probability of encountering one of them within 24 hours of Rolf Harris being banged up is pretty remote, I'd say.
So we're left with the edifying spectacle of a man of the cloth making up a story about him bullying a small child because he couldn't think of any other way to introduce his point - which was whether the works of an artist can be, or should be, divorced from their actions.
Certainly there have been several news articles about galleries removing Rolf Harris' work from display; he was, for several years in the early 1990s, Britains most bankable artist and one suspects that a lot of people are now gazing disconsolately at was once a valuable potential family heirloom on the living room wall and wondering whether just to stick it in the loft and have done. I'm guessing the portrait of the Queen Harris did is no longer in the gallery at Buck House.
But it does raise the question: to what extent can or should the works of an artist be divorced from their actions? The most obvious case is Eric Gill, whose sculptures decorate the front of the BBC's Broadcasting House, but whose personal life doesn't bear examination in what is a family blog. Suffice to say you wouldn't have wanted to be a member of his family. Or one of his pets.
Then there was Rousseau, who put his own children into an orphanage to free up time to write down his brilliant and necessary ideas; John Lennon, who knocked both his wives around; Caravaggio, who murdered someone; and Woody Allen, whose private life was so scandalous he had to move to France. There's a very long list of artists who have created what at least some consider to be great works but who were downright loathsome in their private lives.
So, seeing as how it's Friday and nobody does any work on Fridays, that's the question for today: To what extend can, or should, the life of the artist be considered distinct from their works? Or should we just quietly dispose of their art when the truth comes out?
