Artists and Eccentricity

 

    In our day people associate artistic ability with eccentricity.  Research has indicated that people value art more highly if they are told the creator is unconventional in behavior {1].  Yet the association may not be unfounded.  According to another recent study truly creative people are indeed more likely to flout social expectations [2].  Yet this idea is far from universal.  In many cultures such as Heian Japan and Renaissance England poetry has been among the accomplishments expected of courtiers at the center of power.  For Pope, the poet, far from being a transgressive personality, is a skilled technician capable of eloquently expressing normative sentiments: “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed” [3]. 

     The fact is that, though contradictory, both notions are valid, indeed complementary.  Just as every work of art reflects lived experience with a twist, never exactly duplicating it, and every phrase rests to some extent upon remembered language, every work in part affirms consumers’ expectations and in part twists or disappoints them.  In this way art transmits accumulated cultural data to every new generation yet avoids stagnating, always potentially admitting new data.  Folk, mass, and popular art are all more likely to tend toward the side of the continuum that confirms received ideas, while avant-garde art, including much contemporary work, is by definition more unpredictable. 

     Each tendency in fact has an archaic lineage, the first from shamans inspired by ecstatic experiences and the second from ritual priests capable of performing rites according to tradition.  The shaman’s vocation is by definition idiosyncratic, though his role is wholly traditional.  The distinguishing characteristic of his practice is a journey alone into spiritual realms inaccessible to others, often with the aid of those psychoactive substances called entheogens by their advocates [4].  Eliade’s classic study says that shamans are generally considered likely to display “aberrant psychic behavior patterns” if not outright “mental disease,” though he demurs in  part from this judgement, preferring to say simply that “they are separated from the rest of the community by the intensity of their own religious experience, "and that that break from the group begins the practitioner’s “true life” [5].

     On the other hand, priests are, even in pro-literate cultures, fundamentally learned men who are educated in the proper performance of ritual duties such as sacrifice.  In ancient Jewish, Hindu, and Classical Greek and Roman culture, the role of the priest is essential if one wishes one’s ceremonies to be efficacious.  His job, like that of a Roman Catholic priest administering sacraments, is in no way dependent on his individual spiritual character but rather on his knowing the prescribed procedures and the correct magic formulae.  Whereas the shaman may go into trance and otherwise act in extravagant or mysterious ways, the priest probably will present as a sober and respectable individual.  This function is as prevalent in oral cultures as in those with writing.  Thus an African anthropologist notes that only priests can offer “major sacrifices” and reliably transmit tribal lore.  According to an observer long resident among the Tiv of Nigeria, their priests were “grave” and “dignified” men [6].

     The same division is apparent in urbanized societies.  According to Plato, “just as they [Korybantian revelers] do not dance while in their right mind, thus the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they compose heir beautiful melodies” [7].  Yet the very fact that such celebrants were collectively enacting a social ritual indicates their normative role.  Moralizing poets like Theognis and the composers of Doric choral poems reinforced values shared by their community, while monodists might  express more idiosyncratic attitudes.  Thus Tyrtaios regularly praised valor in war, whereas Arkhílokhos expressed a more individualistic sentiment, and in  the nineteenth century Rimbaud’s transgression may be measured against the regularities of Claudel. 

     Genres may cluster toward one end or another of this spectrum.  Popular, folk, and mass literature all tend to reinforce pre-existing ideas, while experimental and avant-garde texts will overturn them.  A good deal of extremely sentimental, patriotic, and pious material is churned out to strengthen the status quo, while works more radical in form are likely to be cast in novel forms as well as are works of art brut.  One might contrast even within a single author’s oeuvre Christopher Smart’s craftsmanlike and orthodox Song to David with his unpredictable and verbally pyrotechnic Jubilate Agno.  In the twentieth century,  T. S. Eliot also illustrates both sides of the polarity, with his early poetry free and fragmented in form, disillusioned in vision, and quite novel in style and his later work in regular cadences as well as exemplifying his self-consciously reactionary formula (in “For Lancelot Andrewes”) "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic [sic] in religion.” 

     Earlier literature had been largely sponsored by either the court or the church, guaranteeing a more or less conventional ideology and well as stimulating fulsome dedications in the hope of patronage, the equivalent of what would today be a grant or a commission.  With the coming of capitalism and the spread of literacy accompanying an increase in the middle class, not only the authors of best-sellers, but also such accomplished writers as Dickens and Mark Twain sought middle-brow audiences while others like Baudelaire and Stephen Crane scorned the bourgeoisie, creating counter-cultural or otherwise elitist bohemias.  Today a career as any sort of artist (the case is particularly obvious for poets) is so marginal that one may be considered a bit eccentric even to consider such an impractical ambition. 

     This dialectic has been obscured by the principle critical tradition (including Plato, Sidney, Puttenham, and Matthew Arnold) which has, often defending art against those to whom it seemed frivolous and moral, always maintained that the poet’s task is to define and reinforce his society’s ethical rules.  This millennia-long public relations campaign has obscured the extent to which certain writers, and portions of the work of others, have criticized or flouted accepted norms.  Ben Shahn notes that many people who would be glad to have a Van Gogh on their wall would be discomfited to find Van Gogh himself in their living room [8]. 

     The indices of aesthetic and social conformity often coincide, though they need not.  One can imagine, of course, an individual of thoroughly irregular life who nonetheless writes in quite regular meters or, on the other hand, a pillar of bourgeois respectability whose work is wholly experimental.  Most works and most artists will prove somewhat elusive, occupy shifting yet meaningful positions in the spectrum of possibilities.  Identification neither as traditionalist nor radical indicates value.  Bohemianism associated with high spirits and extravagance in one person may manifest as cruelty and self-destruction in another.  Likewise, of a hundred new expressive novelties only a few will suggest fruitful avenues for continued work. (the percentage may be similar for scientific researcher proposing hypotheses in a laboratory.)

     Still, locating an author or a poem along the continuum of conventionality yields information about the theme and about the place of a given text in  the society of its day.  Surely Villon’s life among thieves influenced his innovations far beyond his use of underworld slang and Allen Ginsberg’s enthusiasm for flamboyant transgression was of a piece with the originality of Howl.  On the other hand the decorum of John Milton and Alfred, Lord Tennyson is consistent with their influential roles as Cromwell’s Latin Secretary and as Poet Laureate. 

     So the historic association between artists and eccentricity is neither baseless nor universal.  The two are articulated in a way meaningful for the expression of theme and style and indicative as well of the place of the arts in a given context.  The beards and berets that signify an artist in Bushmiller’s Nancy comic strip may be in part a silly Philistine invention, but such symbols are also indicators of a genuine social tendency.  Art is aways simultaneously conforming and nonconforming to the expectations of those who receive it.  It confirms and also challenges preconceived ideas, and, depending on which end of the spectrum of predictability a given work occupies, the artist may seem a pillar of the establishment or a revolutionary.

 

 

1.  Wijnand Adriaan Peter Van Tilburg and Eric Raymond Igou, “From Van Gogh to Lady Gaga: Artist eccentricity increases perceived artistic skill and art appreciation” in the European Journal of Social Psychology vol. 44 no. 2.

2.  Shelley Carson, “The Unleashed Mind: Why Creative People Are Eccentric,” Scientific American, May 1, 2011.

3.  Essay on Criticism, 97.

4.  The term was introduced in 1976 by a group of ethnobotanists including Jonathan Ott and R. Gordon Wasson.

5.  Mircea Eliade, Shamanism : archaic techniques of ecstasy.  See pages xi , 8, and 13. 

6.  According to Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen (pen name of Laura Bohannon).

7.  Ion.  534a. οὐκ ἔμφρονες ὄντες ὀρχοῦνται, οὕτω καὶ οἱ μελοποιοὶ οὐκ ἔμφρονες ὄντες τὰ καλὰ μέλη ταῦτα ποιοῦσιν.

8.  In “On Nonconformity.”