A little rant

[lizwilliams]

This from karentraviss: The more creative a person is, the more sexual partners they are likely to have, UK investigators have found. Artists and poets had an average of four to 10 sexual partners, compared to three for non-creative types, Newcastle and Open University teams discovered.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4479628.stm

One has to ask oneself: is this because artistic types are inherently more attractive, or just more badly behaved? It's an issue which has been annoying me somewhat over the weekend in the wake of George Best's demise - a lot of the coverage has been along the lines of 'yes, he was a drunk and a wife beater. But what a character, eh? And a genius footballer!' Tyson gets the same kind of coverage. Since when was athleticism an excuse?

If you're single, or in an agreed polyamorous relationship, then fair enough: it's no one's business but your own. But I'm sure we have all run into a few folk who think that writing second-rate novels or painting indifferent oils somehow gives them a free access-all-areas pass into other people's relationships, or allows them to run around behind their partners' backs ('And that's okay because we're so WONDERFULLY CREATIVE and free in our expression!'). I blame Augustus John, Eric Gill and all those late 19th century artistes who thought that their genius entitled them to shag anything that moved: other people's maids, their own kids...And carries right through to the Bloomsbury Group, a bunch of mediocre poseurs if ever there was one (with the exception of V Woolf), the Factory, and pretty much any rock star you care to mention. It probably reaches its culmination with Anais Nin, who really wasn't all that good at anything except having lots of sexual partners.

I don't think genius entitles you to anything except acknowledgment that you're good at something. I don't really care all that much about other people's lives - but I'd like it if, just to keep a balance, some creative person with a long, dull, everyday marriage was celebrated, precisely for that.

Comments

[camies.livejournal.com]

'Sfunny, I was just wondering about this recently - the current WiP has to do with it and the apparent tendency for biopics of arty people (esp. women) to go along the lines of 'Never mind the art, who did they shag?'* Anais Nin as you say did seem to think that promiscuity was some kind of artistic endeavour in its own right. (Mind you when i was doing the London performance poetry circuit in the late 1980s it seemed a lot of people treated it as first and foremost a dating agency)

*though this may be the way the films in question - bios of Iris Murdoch, Frida Kahlo, Jacqueline du Pre' - were reviewed / reported on, rather than reflecting the content of the movies.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

>(Mind you when i was doing the London performance poetry circuit in the late 1980s it seemed a lot of people treated it as first and foremost a dating agency)

Same with the Brighton poetry circuit, what I saw of it.

This is one reason I've stuck with the same writing groups over the years - they actually focus on the work and we've rarely had any prima donnas (I say 'rarely' because of the one person who exhibited...disturbing...tendencies, but he left before I arrived).