Last week we talked about Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, and we also touched lightly on the fact that by the middle of his career, he was becoming more famous as a personality than as a painter. He became a case study of what celebrity can do to achievement.
Modern celebrity often makes it impossible to judge the real significance of a person burdened with it, even a great artist. Perhaps especially an artist. It can be nearly impossible to separate the substance from the celebrity.
Once you become “known for your well-knownness,” as Daniel Boorstin put in 1962, all the real accomplishments that happened before you became famous tend to get washed out. I wrote about this in my Audie Murphy book, because he experienced both kinds of fame. The one that was celebrity as a movie star eroded the depth of his wartime experience that was in equal parts heroic and very traumatic.
Turning to artists, this was also the case with Jackson Pollock. Particularly after he appeared in Life Magazine in 1949 and it anointed him the country’s “Greatest Living Painter,” he became more known for his.... being well-known than for his artistic achievements.
Those achievements were, granted, very difficult to process. Having someone be a celebrity sort of absolves the public of the difficult job of trying to understand what this person did and whether it’s worthwhile; knowing someone as a celebrity keeps you from having to do the heavy lifting of understanding. I’ve often had a suspicion that a lot of people would rather not understand things if they don’t have to.
One of my favorite writers and thinkers is Albert Camus. In 1957, looking at the position of the artist in contemporary culture, he said that today celebrated artists tend to become known “only through the intermediary of the popular press or radio, which will provide a convenient and simplified idea of him.” “In this way,” Camus says, “millions of people will have the feeling of knowing this or that great artist of our time because they have learned from the newspapers that he raises canaries or that he never stays married more than six months.”
Dawn Ades, an art historian at England’s University of Essex, met Dalí when she was still in grad school and said that when she began specializing in his works in the 1970s, she had to “work very hard to make it clear how serious he really was.”
The cautionary tale woven into this is not one directed just at artists. It’s also directed at us. It requires work to see through celebrity but if we can do that, we might perceive some of the achievement that has the power to transform art itself.
