Banishment

Creative people used to grow organically out of their time and place, to the point that the virtue of creativity was trueness to one’s roots. And people affirmed “their” artist to the extent that his words sprang from their spring, that he sang their song with a voice they didn’t have. And that was the criterion for good art as well: trueness to oneself, which translated then to trueness to one’s culture.

Only stratified romantics could still idealize the present world this way. The only good artists left are the suicides—those who are utterly alienated from their surroundings and heritage. Proust barricaded himself in an egg carton-lined room, Kafka couldn’t stand his father, Dostoevsky drank himself to death and Tolstoy ran away. It’s like some damn demented nursery rhyme.

Pan to ancient Greece, where plays were the center of city-wide festivals, where poets and playwrights were lauded for their patriotism and grace. I’m not lamenting the loss of culture (pretense of the elitist), but pointing to a radical difference in art’s place in society—which, art being a compass of culture’s illness, points to something more significant.

Because to be an artist, these days, is to banish oneself from the world—not opprobrium, but something much worse: invisibility. Quite appropriate, too, for the artist toils in the realm of the spirit, melds the mind to beauty—traffics in invisible wares—while society either scrounges for the capitalist’s crumbs or feeds the system with a nihilistic materialism that starves the spirit into ironic submission.

And so alienation is the artist’s self-prescription, choosing solitude and bitter loneliness over a high place among the damned. In that sense, art is still a product of the times, for man is utterly alienated from himself, and thus the artist represents the conscience of humanity, calling out in an eloquent whisper drowned in the hidden howling of despair. He is not alienated, but walked away from.