We just had our first snow of the year here in Brooklyn--I woke up
yesterday morning and there it was, three or four inches of the white
stuff, blanketing streets and sidewalks and dampening the noise of the
Brooklyn morning (I was thankful for the usual silence, believe you me).
I hope you're not suggesting, Stephen, that there's an either/or,
Thanatos/Eros decision to make! Especially in the white, solitary
silence, Eros creeps into our thoughts. Better that than the ashes.
Best,
George
Stephen Vincent wrote:
> 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
>>
>
>
>
--
George Hunka
[log in to unmask]
http://www.ghunka.com
|
