Savage Messiah: Ken Russell > Savage Messiah: Ken Russell
Ken in The Times 2009
Iain Fisher:
Nothing by Ken today.
Iain Fisher:
Art for art's sake; money for God's sake
Ken in The Tiimes today 6 Jan 2009
Ken looks at starving artists: “Art is its own reward, but it has always helped to have a generous patron”.
“Starving artist syndrome is the lot of those obsessives among us for whom the desire and drive to devote ourselves to creative expression outstrips our income… For art is a powerful and intoxicating addiction to creativity. No artist ever really takes a day off. To create something that wasn't there before, to make a slice of the imaginary real and to get lost in the focused intensity of it may well be the ultimate joy…. It takes a lot of courage to be an artist. The comforts of stability may never belong to the person who is absorbed in an internal struggle to bring forth something ineffable, something beyond words but true nonetheless.”
Then Ken looks at individual artists:
* Damien Hirst “…entitled to be rewarded for having the self-esteem to ask overblown prices for his stuffed sharks or slices of cow”
* Michelangelo “It is said that he was forced by his agent to put dirt on a sculpture to improve its resale value as a supposed antique.”
* Caravaggio “Patrons began throwing money at his art, enabling the birth of modern art… His taste for confrontation led him into exile and death at 38 from a knife wound.”
* Picasso “…that most inventive of all artists, never took a day off.”
* Van Gogh “…arguably the best artist of all time… Van Gogh's only financial ambition was to earn enough to buy a crust of bread, a tube of yellow paint and to relieve Theo from having to subsidise him”
* Dylan Thomas “He believed that the freedom of an artist to explore evocative expression more than compensated for a lack of plush comfort.”
And a couple of artists Ken has filmed
* Henri Gaudier-Breszka “The genius sculptor… was a passionate starving artist living in poverty, as were many of his friends in the Vorticist movement”
* Isadora Duncan “so poor she hardly knew where the next bottle of champagne was coming from”
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