A Portrait of the Artist

A rather unfortunate marriage has occasioned the popular conception of the artist. What remains is a bizarre hangover from Romanticism merged with idiotic armchair Freudianism. This was almost inevitable. The Romantic idea of "genius" springs from Kant's use in the 3rd Critique as one through whom nature speaks. This melded all too well with Nietzschean/Schopenhauerian ideas of a primordial Will that is somehow tapped into directly through the new prophet, the artist (they did not make this leap explicitly...their prioritizing of the artist, juxtaposing him with the saint, and metaphysics of the will were adjoined to the Kantian idea of Genius...now the Primal speaks through the artist). Now it is one small step to explicitly claiming that this primal is the "Unconscious" Freud and others around his time spoke of. The fallout of all this is a metaphysical/aesthetic idea of artistic genius joined to a psychological conception of the unconscious. All that is left is to "torture" the genius and Romanticize the psychological. First the Romantic is psychologized and then the psychological is Romanticized. We are left with a notion of a man privy to the churning darkness that is the unconscious and fatally flawed existentially and psychologically as a result. What the artist has really suffered here is the stupid mythologizing of the small but popular mind.