The Forger's Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature
Started reading this book today. Not too far in, but this bit brought to mind the eternal 'what is art' conversation. I think it goes part way to answering the question, or at least adding to a list of criteria:
He's talking about the poet Chatterton. Chatterton lived a note-perfect Romantic poet's life, culminating in his suicide. Wordsworth's first published poem was about him, Rossetti idolised him, Ackroyd's written a novel about him. His most famous work is written from the POV of a fictional Vicar, and many people for up to ten years after his death believed this person had actually existed. The author's question in this section is why - given so little of his work exists, and so much of his life has been romanticised, mythologised and flat-out made up - he is regarded as a fraud, when so many artists whose own work is a mimickry of the form, style, subject and metre of the greats who preceded them, are regarded as greats?
It also got me thinking about the desire to meet artists, to possess their autographs, to get closer to them, and whether or not 'authenticity' as described above can survive the 21st century ability to get much closer to the makers of art than ever before.
He's talking about the poet Chatterton. Chatterton lived a note-perfect Romantic poet's life, culminating in his suicide. Wordsworth's first published poem was about him, Rossetti idolised him, Ackroyd's written a novel about him. His most famous work is written from the POV of a fictional Vicar, and many people for up to ten years after his death believed this person had actually existed. The author's question in this section is why - given so little of his work exists, and so much of his life has been romanticised, mythologised and flat-out made up - he is regarded as a fraud, when so many artists whose own work is a mimickry of the form, style, subject and metre of the greats who preceded them, are regarded as greats?
The reasons for this lie deep in the mythography of Chatterton and an examination of them should provoke a serious revaluation of Romanticism and a reassessment of our own value of authenticity today. The very cliches that come so easily to mind when describing his marvellous life are our direct inheritance of Romantic theories of authorship and creativity, in which the poet is marked out by genius, a genius confirmed not by producing striking poetry, but by living an intemperate life, a life of 'limit experiences'. Put bluntly, the life gives authenticity to the art, and so life replaces the art - and still does, whether we are dealing with the furore over writers like Benjamin Wilkomirksi, who wrote a contested Holocause memoir, or simply the authentically unmade bed of Tracy Emin submitted as a Turner Prize art installation. Authenticity is measured, then, by testifying to lived experience - whether social, gendered, and/or ethnic; or experimentation with sex, drugs, and/or radical politics (an often lethal cocktail.); or merely by professing a profound and unaccomodating eccentricity. But evidently in all these instances, authenticity is located in the body of the artist.
It also got me thinking about the desire to meet artists, to possess their autographs, to get closer to them, and whether or not 'authenticity' as described above can survive the 21st century ability to get much closer to the makers of art than ever before.