Transcendentalism and Abuse In Art
newmusicbox November 20, 2007
Self-images based on transcendence can lead to behavior ranging from insensitivity to horrific violence, and that they are often incompatible with empathy.
Ryan
Tanaka has summarized the problem well in his article “Transcendentalism and Materialism: Classical Music and Improvisation in
the
“For
some, the paradoxes engrained within Modernist ideologies would prove itself to
be
too
much. Arshile Gorky, a seminal influence on the Abstract Expressionist movement,
hanged himself in 1948 after a series of traumatic events, including his wife
and children leaving him after seven years of marriage. Jackson Pollack, who was
well known for his alcoholism, died in an accident while driving drunk in 1956.
[Ed. Note: A young admirer he had recently met was with him and was also
killed.] In 1970, Mark Rothko was
found dead in his studio after slashing his veins with a razor blade. According
to some of Rothko’s friends, part of the suicide might have been motivated by
the fact that he wasn’t able to “cope with the contradiction of being
showered with material rewards for works which ‘howled their opposition to
bourgeois materialism.’”
Is the image of the artist as transcendentally inspired and internally conflicted changing as modernism declines? All thoughts are welcome.
William Osborne