So You Wanna Be An Artist

Michelangelo was a recluse who rarely bathed. Caravaggio was murderer who spent the latter part of his life on the run, toting his brushes and paints with him. And every schoolchild knows the story of poor Van Gogh. The history of art is filled with miscreants and sociopaths. I have a theory about it. To begin with, I define art as the fulfillment of the obsessive impulse to share one's personal experience of life with others. Since experience itself is impossible to share, being that it's already in the past the instant after we've experienced it, whether it's the experience of a looking at a bowl of fruit or the experience of, say, a walk in the woods, it can only be shared through metaphor, which is one thing taking the place of another. And therefore, since a painting can at best be nothing more than a poor stand-in for the experience, the artist must remain always and forever dissatisfied, engaged in a frustrating and often debilitating quest for something he cannot possibly ever accomplish. The artist's life becomes one long, drawn-out tantrum.