Someday all of your heroes will die. Equally, my heroes are not immune from mortality and will eventually shuffle of their mortal coils; they may even die, as Jonathan Safran Foer put it, “of being an artist.” I have this lingering dread that one day I shall look up at a screen, computer or otherwise, to find an austere message saying “Bob Dylan is dead”, “Ian McEwan is dead” or “Anyone you have ever loved is either dead or will die.” This dread exists despite the quite inescapable truth that people have this horrible tendency of dying every now and then – and there is a trend for this fate to befall artists a lot quicker than the average man or woman – so why this melancholy for a truth that is not yet present and even quite distant in many cases?
It is largely due to the fact that I am, admittedly, terribly naïve. I, and many others, cannot disassociate the artist from his oeuvre, therefore when the person meets their end, grisly or otherwise, it is almost the despair prevents us from appreciating that which they accomplished during their lives. As far as we are concerned, the work dies with the artist. That is to say, once the artist is dead, their previous work somehow seems dead to us; we cannot appreciate it in the same way we once did.
Works tend to take on more significance following the demise of the artist – one sees ‘Cottage with Thatched Roof’with different eyes following the revelation that it was Van Gogh’s last before he killed himself. By the same notion, no-one reads Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ without thinking that it insinuates quite heavily that she had lingering thoughts of suicide, whether she actually did the deed or not. But, perhaps most overwhelming of all, is the sense of unease we seem to feel when consuming the product of someone who has died – the thought that they will never create anything again becomes undetachable from any appreciation.
Within this society of consumption and branding, perhaps we have become too obsessed by the name attached to the work – it is only time before the maxim “art is dead” transforms itself to “the artist is dead”. Because the work lives on. Because art will continue to be produced until the end of time, despite – or perhaps because of – the legacies of the myriad people who are no longer with us.
Detaching the artist from the art is easier said than done, yet as the people whose work I truly admire fade into the annals of history, I feel it is becoming an ever present necessity.
Alexander Britton
Photo: Manannan Fanch
