If there’s a general rule that artists today should follow it would be “Unless the work you’re creating runs the risk of making you look totally ridiculous, don’t even bother.” But being ridiculous isn’t easy. Unlike almost everything else that surrounds us, there’s no formula, and it can’t be taught. The models of what once were considered ridiculous aren’t very useful because now they’re enshrined among the classics of Western Culture.
Start with Beethoven. The Third Symphony, called the Eroica, was considered too long, aggressive and pointlessly violent. People said it was endless, emotionally hysterical, and poorly-structured. Next, the famous opening “fate” motif of the Fifth Symphony was mocked as crude and obsessive, like a drunk pounding on a tavern door. Critics complained he built an entire symphony from a commonplace idea. They said it sounded simplistic and obsessive. But the Late String Quartets, considered now to be among the apogees of Western art music, were reserved the most brutal critiques. People said they were filled with random abrupt stops, bizarre harmonies and passages that were disjointed and pointlessly abstract. Critics of the time said Beethoven lost his ability to compose and suggested his music was the product of a disturbed mind. Some performers refused to play them altogether. Other composers who shared the vitriol of critics were Hector Berlioz, Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky.
What about the painters? Most know about poor Vincent van Gogh, however fewer people know that J. M. Turner was considered by many of his contemporaries to be a lunatic, at best a posing fraud and by many judgments, untalented. His works were said to look like soap suds or colored steam. People said he’d simply flung the paint on the canvas. They said his work wasn’t ground-breaking, just an embarrassment that he hoped to pass off as art. The kind ones said that once he’d known how to paint but forgot. Other artists who received the same treatment were El Greco, Edouard Manet and Claude Monet.
And the scribblers? To the list we can add ridiculous writers such as Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, Honore de Balzac, James Joyce and Walt Whitman. Here’s a contemporary critic of Leaves of Grass: “A mass of stupid filth.” “The vilest collection of nonsense that ever masqueraded as poetry,” and said Whitman: “lowered himself to the level of a brute, abandoning sense, meter, decency, and shame.” The critic concluded that his work was morally debased, warning readers to avoid it: “No man with a sound mind could have written such lines.” Whitmanesque was once an insult.
Though many contemporary artists try, it’s not that easy to be ridiculous. It isn’t simply being outrageous like slicing oneself with razors on a stage, or cruelly shocking, biting the heads off mice, or purposely vulgar, putting a crucifix in a pile of cow dung or a bottle filled with urine. Being ridiculous means being yourself, but that’s difficult. Why? In grade school we learn that “man is a social animal,”, could that be it? Sticking out in a group has never been the key to social success. What greater insult for a teenager is there than “You think you’re special, don’t you?” No more parties for you.
Jonathan Swift, another ridiculous writer whose work received such criticism as “A heap of ordure thrown in the face of the public, with the pretense that the stench is instruction,” wrote “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Ridiculous artists have no choice but to be themselves. Their visions are a blessing and a curse, solitary roads where they alone see the horizon.