5 December

From the New York Times, a piece on whether what an artist is like as a person also determines in some way the value of their art. I’d add another wrinkle to this, and say is art devalued by becoming propaganda? One of the reasons protest music has always left me cold is that I think it often lacks art, and mistakes the role of art at the same time. “Caravaggio was a murderous thug. Ezra Pound was a pro-fascist and pro-Nazi anti-Semite. Virginia Woolf had an anti-Semitic streak of her own. T. S. Eliot out-and-out hated Jews. Picasso treated the women in his life abysmally; two killed themselves. Norman Mailer stabbed his wife. Walt Whitman likened the “intellect and caliber” of blacks to that of “so many baboons.” William Golding tried to rape a 15-year-old girl. The list could go on.”