Tis the season of “The Artist”: On screen, in print, and on stage, the man of the hour is the creative genius, the absolutist, the martyr, the suffering sinner redeemed only when he gives himself away, lovingly and without reservations, to his art.
Just ask Hollywood, which is all aflutter at Bradley Cooper’s portrayal of Leonard Bernstein in Maestro, a masterly portrait of the composer that shows him, baton raised like a magic wand, willing gorgeous music into life like a sorcerer summoning the spirits from beyond. Or stop by your local bookstore for a glimpse at Werner Herzog’s long-awaited memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, an account of a life lived on camera in extreme devotion to his craft. Or treat yourself to a night on Broadway, where the most-anticipated play this year is a revival of Cabaret. Movie star Eddie Redmayne takes the role of the Emcee, the commander-in-chief in the battle between a doomed but noble band of performers and the Nazi machine out to extinguish them.
Why this sudden infatuation with art and the wild-eyed men and women who give to it their all? Popular culture, after all, has spent the last decade staging airless, mirthless auto-da-fés as its finest practitioners declare publicly (often with arms painfully twisted behind their backs) that art is merely the handmaiden of ideology and that no creative effort is worthy of praise unless it echoes the right dogmatic convictions. Why the change of heart? Why pay so much attention to maverick artists, real or fictional, who defy the conventions of their time and sacrifice everything—money, marriage, morality—in pursuit of truth and beauty?
