What do you do with great works of art from horrible, terrible, nasty people?

Was listening to an NRP segment on eccentric people the other day. Very interesting. I might have missed a bit here and there.

A point that hit me was when people decided someone was eccentric.

A smart eccentric person who wants his ideas heard will "go undercover" (my words) for awhile.
A scenerio where we've all been there....
A new person is hired, they from the start come out with ideas that just don't set right with others because "they're strange/eccentric" That person will always have the reputation of the odd one in the work place. Not listened to.

But if that person comes in and for awhile acts "normal" and gains the confidence of others that he's just like them, he's golden. THEN he can present all these really cool ideas he's had, and most people think he's a genius.

At that point, he's free to bring his goat to work if he wants, because he's just so on point.

In other words, bide your time grasshopper.

Pablo Picasso was a real **** when it came to his treatment of women. These things need to be seen in context. Franz Joseph Haydn was a **** toward his first wife, but that was an arranged marriage, and his friends claimed she was shrewish and constantly complained. (He does seem to have married with unrealistic expectations.) He finally married his mistress after his wife died, and that seems to have been a love match. No one forced Picasso to chase women, nor did he marry by arrangement. Wagner certainly was a ****. He seemed obsessed with seducing other men's wives.

That being said, it's not just artists. Gilles de Rais, also known as Bluebeard, and a companion in arms to Jeanne d'Arc, tortured and murdered more than one hundred children (prosecuted for several crimes, he admitted to them to avoid torture, but then described the torture and murder of the children in lurid detail). Before him, Edward II Plantagenet was a homosexual who was attracted to Hugh le Despenser the Younger (of the now prominent Spencer family) and basically handed over management of the government to Hugh le Despenser the Elder. He and his son were accused of torturing and murdering almost two dozen members of the baronage, whose properties they then seized. Captured at Bristol in 1326, the Elder was immediately hanged, and his body cut up and fed to the stray dogs of the city. His son hung on for several weeks, before being judicially murdered. Edward II was then imprisoned, and soon thereafter was murdered in a gruesome, brutal manner which I won't describe. His son, Edward III Plantagenet, is often accused of murderous cruelty, but I see nothing which was not common to the times in which he lived. More than a century later, Richard III Plantagenet was accused (probably justly) of murdering his two nephews--Edward V Plantagenet and Richard, Duke of York. Richard III was defeated and succeeded by Henry VII Tudor, whose son Henry VIII seems to have been addicted to judicial murder.

Horatio Nelson was merely vulgar, and cuckolded Sir William Hamilton under his own roof, with his beautiful and grossly obese wife, Emma. Vulgarity and infidelity are too common to take much notice of those sins, unless one is famous. Many of the "trappers and traders" of the American west seem to have been serial killers who got away with it by going to the frontiers where their crimes went unpunished, unless the aboriginals managed to catch them. Jeremiah Johnson came back home to find his wife, a Flathead, murdered, and is said to have tracked down and murdered three hundred Crow warriors as revenge. The Crow believed you needed your liver to reach the afterlife, so Johnson was said to have cut out, cooked and eaten the livers of his victims. He was known in his own lifetime as "Liver Eatin' Johnson."

Let's face it, kids, humans are real shits. Friedrich II of Prussia, known as Frederick the Great, once said "The more I see of men, the better I like my dog."

AS Leonard Cohen wrote: "amid the garbage and the flowers."

I don't understand why anyone would expect a great work of art to have been created by an exemplary human being. The ability to use language, employ color, or combine melody and harmony in an aesthetically pleasing manner really has nothing to do with the social skills of the creator.

Picasso is a good example to me. I never liked him as a human being and for years I refused to acknowledge his art. Today I can look at the two separately.

Now there's someone I can't tolerate right now. Went to see a documentary about him end of last year and man he was one craptastic human for much of his life. Still like his music and poetry, just try to avoid his renditions of them. I'm sure it will pass.

The only artist I've maintained a long-term grudge against is Miles Davis. Everyone else, meh, if I like the work, I'm going to enjoy it.

Is murder a social skill?

It must be nice for those of us who don't like any disgraced artists. This means that all of the human beings they respect are either genuinely good... or they are better at hiding the bodies.

(Being able to hide your sins would be a useful skilll)

Not murdering people is.

I could never understand what was supposed to be so great about Guernica, until I watched this 3D version of it. I couldn't see any of this on the flat canvas.

The most recent example of this is when they used Gary Glitter’s Rock ‘n Roll in the film Joker.

I felt quite uneasy until I heard Glitter wasn’t getting anything from it, then I felt OK. And it is a really good scene, the music is perfect.

That probably sums up appreciating the art but keeping the artist at arm’s length.

If you dig deep enough into the life and personality of the majority of people, I would bet it is possible to focus on enough negatives to build a case against them. I believe it is not always their own fault that such is possible. There are too many colliding factors at work with all of us.

I love NPR for that reason, interesting tidbits all day long. They always have an interesting take on things.

I heard that Lawrence Whelk was a real prick.

That is a really interesting portrayal of Guernica but You gotta see the pinting in its full size. Its huuge and it makes its point with underpainting s of yellows and greens uner all the black. And his blacks are made of Vrmillion and Sap green rathr than a flat lamp black.
Lena was film special eeffects artist and I see she used the same tricks as her work in "The Nightmare before Christmas" (by her ex)

Don't know how I forgot about De Quincey — he wrote an essay:

Murder, considered as one of the fine arts

I haven't watched all of this video. I am putting it here and plan to watch the rest in a few hours.

NO - not Lawrence Whelk - you have destroyed my childhood - what next Mr. Rogers??!

Christopher Hitchens did a huge expose of Mother Theresa. I don’t know if that’s it, but it was very good.

She wasn’t very nice, like a lot of religious types.

That video goes beyond mother Teresa. John Wayne, JFK. As I said, I haven't yet seen all of it.