Not that Allison needs help, but I don't think her interest here has
anything to do with the well known proclivities of Los Angeles and environs
- where it's well known that gallery owners, for example, in sympathy with
the wild sexual drives of their exhibiting artists - have been known to sell
paintings and sculptures while wearing bikinis (and other forms of tropical
drag) - in truth I think Alison, consciously or not, wants to take the focus
and tone of the list off Thanatos (sp?), the death God and put us back on
to Eros.
I do agree Winter in the USA and the Iraq war have turned the imaginations
of many of into ashes (heah, we're only witnessing the death of the USA -
which we know is inevitable), but it's still a grievous moment for all our
loves.
Anyway I thank Allison for pointing us back or forward to one of a poet's
and artist's possibly most essential gifts and missions. If, indeed, it was
the spirit of Los Angeles that pulled the love trigger - well, I love LA,
too!
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
> How true this all is -what lives we live (lived in my case)
> Why did Allison suddenly come up with this what happened on her travels?
> 'We have a right to know what's going on (quote tom Waits)I hear banging
> going on'
> P past it P
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
> poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alison Croggon
> Sent: 05 December 2005 00:44
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Sex and the Artist
>
> I assume some of you have caught up with this study. Not only are poets
> unhinged, they have very exciting sex lives. (Presumably Hildegard von
> Bingen doesn't enter this picture...)
>
> All best
>
> A
>
> http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17458076%255E1
> 6947,00.html
>
> Maestros of jolly rogering
> If we think poets and painters have hotter sex lives, it may be because they
> are good at persuading us, writes Ben Macintyre
> December 05, 2005
>
> "SEX and art are the same thing," declared Pablo Picasso; this was one of
> the greatest chat-up lines ever, from a master of the art.
>
> Finally, a scientific survey has proven what everyone has long suspected
> (which is what scientific surveys ought to do): creative artists, it
> appears, really do have more exotic love lives than the rest of the
> population. The new study, published this week in Proceedings of the Royal
> Society, suggests that artists, from poets to painters to puppeteers, have,
> on average, twice as many sexual partners as non-artists.
>
> Promiscuous Picasso, Lord Byron the philanderer, Dylan Thomas the boozy
> womaniser: these were not simply bonking bohemians, it seems, but artists
> doing what their genes told them to do. According to the researchers the
> greater the artistic endeavour, the larger the sexual appetites. (There are
> some obvious exceptions to this rule: Julio Iglesias claims to have had sex
> with 3000 women, but has never yet sung a decent song.)
>
> The authors of the study also suggest a link between artistic sexuality and
> schizophrenia. The genes linked to schizophrenia appear to be particularly
> common among poets and artists: the illness may contribute to artistic
> individuality and a uniquely imagined view of the world, but it may also
> explain the attractiveness of artists to others, and thus why those traits
> have been passed on.
>
> Indeed, artistic ability may have evolved as a form of mating display, a
> courtship technique to attract partners. In his 2001 book The Mating Mind,
> Geoffrey Miller argued that intellectual and artistic ability were a form of
> human plumage, designed to entice sexual partners. "Come up and see my
> etchings" may be a central statement in human evolution.
>
> Artists have more sex, of course, because that is what they are expected to
> do. As rule-breakers, they are assumed to act on impulse, unconstrained by
> the mores that apply to the rest of society. When 83-year-old Lucian Freud
> is discovered to be stepping out with yet another nubile lovely, even
> straitlaced middle England bottles its outrage, accepting this side-effect
> of genius.
>
> Artists (Freud excepted) also tend to die young, making it imperative that
> they gather ye rosebuds while they may. Poets, in fact, die younger than any
> other sort of artist, and younger than almost any other type of
> professional, including deep-sea divers. When Andrew Marvell wrote To His
> Coy Mistress, he was speaking for all artists who sense time's winged
> chariot hurrying near, and want to get laid, a lot, before it runs them
> over:
>
> Had we but world enough, and time,
>
> This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
>
> Artists are not only expected to have sex more, but also to write, paint,
> sing, compose and talk about it, endlessly, preferably in smoky bars. For
> Picasso, sex was a prevailing theme: a recent exhibition in Paris, Picasso
> Erotique, displayed 330 paintings, drawings, engravings and sculptures
> portraying sexual congress, or what Gertrude Stein called Picasso's "dirty
> side". Picasso was genuinely interested in sex all his life, but most modern
> artists feel obliged to include sex in their portfolios, as a matter of
> form. Tracey Emin's installation Everybody I've Ever Slept With: 1963-1995
> is a very good joke, but also a wry reflection on the modern artist who is
> obliged either to celebrate sex or to fake it. The Bad Sex Awards, presented
> annually to the most embarrassing description of the sexual act, is never
> short of contenders.
>
> Artists may not actually have wilder sex lives than mere mortals; they may
> simply be better at misrepresenting what they do in bed. Jerry Seinfeld once
> remarked: "Everyone lies about sex. People lie during sex. If it weren't for
> lies, there'd be no sex."
>
> And artists, being imaginative types, can lie better than anyone else. On
> the other hand, it is de rigueur for a great artist to claim that sex is
> boring ("The biggest nothing" -- Andy Warhol), thus implying that they are
> at it like rabbits. "Nothing nauseates me more than promiscuous sex in and
> out of season," wrote D.H. Lawrence, simultaneously yawning and panting, to
> Ottoline Morrell.
>
> The portrait of the artist as a young stud-muffin may have some scientific
> basis, but it is also a long-running conceit, based largely on wishful
> thinking.
>
> As the artist Dinos Chapman, of the notorious Chapman brothers, pointed out
> this week: "The truth is that artists aren't that special. People just like
> to think so -- especially artists."
>
> But the legend of the artistic and literary libido refuses to die, perhaps
> because for many people sex has become so desperately cheapened and
> unromantic.
>
> On the day the sex lives of the artists was unveiled, another, much grimmer
> report appeared under the less than enticing title, Who Pays for Sex?. Based
> on a survey by the Medical Research Council, this showed that the number of
> British men paying for sex has doubled during the past decade, with nearly
> one in 10 of all males admitting that he had done so during the previous
> five years.
>
> The rise of sex tourism, access to sex via the internet, migrant sex workers
> and rising divorce rates have contributed to a massive growth in commercial
> sex. London alone has an estimated 4000 massage parlours and escort
> services. Pornography remains the most heavily researched subject on the
> web.
>
> The general devaluation of sex surely explains why, more than ever, we need
> to associate sex with art, glamour and the carefree misbehaviour of a
> Picasso or, for that matter, a Kate Moss. Three weeks after Byron died in
> 1824, The Times declared him "the most remarkable Englishman of his
> generation"; this, it should be remembered, was an Englishman who had
> rogered practically anything with a pulse, including boys, various grandes
> dames and his own half-sister. He was mad, bad and dangerous to know; and,
> as an artist, he was feted for it.
>
> The image of the artist as Don Juan, glamorous and faintly unhinged, with a
> tangled and athletic love life, owes more to myth than science, but it is
> one of the oldest and most cherished of our cultural stories. This may be no
> more than escapism; but so is art.
>
> The Times
>
>
>
> Alison Croggon
>
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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