What is art? TMZ art history

Looking back over the course of art history, many young people think that there is little to be interested in. We see the wigged out (literally) composers and painters of the past as antique images, their lives uninteresting, their lifestyles out-of-touch and ancient. More often than not, we are taught about their works and how they affected their period and today. However, if we could look closer into the lives of these masters of art, we would find a different story- that scandal is not just something for the TMZ era and that people were just as eccentric back then as they are now.\nTake, for example, one of the most popular icons of Gen-X, Kurt Cobain. He made a living creating music that resonated inner turmoil and chaos against what he felt was an uprooted and unconcerned society. Feeling incompatible with the ever-globalizing world of the mid-’90s, Cobain killed himself at the height of the grunge movement, leaving fans devastated and placing him as a cultural legend. However, when one thinks of Cobain, one rarely identifies the similarities between the turn-of-the-century rock god with Romantic-era painter Francisco Goya. In his later years, Goya bought a solitary country home, naming it “la Quinta del Sordo” or the House of the Deaf Man, after he lost his hearing and began to slowly go insane from encephalitis. On the walls of his house, he began painting the infamous “Black Paintings,” the most famous being “Saturn Devouring His Son,” in which the Roman god Saturn is seen grotesquely eating the bloody corpse of one of his children. Like Cobain, Goya’s iconography was macabre, and because of its depth, has become a canon of art.\nNowadays, scandal often takes the form of young female celebrities. Singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse is notorious for her drug abuse, her tumultuous marriage and her incredible blues/jazz vocal talent. However, some 50 years before her time, poet laureate of the U.S. Elizabeth Bishop had her own “Blake incarcerated.” Following a fifteen-year torrid affair with Brazilian architect Lota Soares, often involving alcoholism, depression and physical abuse, Bishop escaped back home to America, where Soares followed her. She eventually killed herself.\nEven our very young tragic stars, such as River Phoenix, and more recently, Heath Ledger, have followed in the footsteps of other artistic greats. The pair, very well-known for escaping the trap of remaining teen stars, led successful careers and were known for their diversity in selecting roles before they died under mysterious circumstances. Perhaps the greatest-known child star in the history of art followed the same pattern: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who died at 35 of an unknown disease.\nAs you can see, there is more passion in the vaults of art history than are made apparent in overviews of history. The canon of art has changed greatly over the course of time, but the lives of artists and their effects on art have not. Hopefully, the correlation between the private lives of artists and the brilliance they produced are enough to make one fully appreciate art history.