JOLLY DAYS

Biography

From 1994, a New York Times survey of biographies that still speaks to the zeitgeist, decrying the exploitative biography, attempting to pass as “honest”, serious examination:

…Joyce Carol Oates has called this disturbing new subgenre “pathography.” “Its motifs are dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct. Its scenes are sensational, wallowing in squalor and foolishness; its dominant images are physical and deflating; its shrill theme is 'failed promise,' if not outright 'tragedy.' “

Whereas traditional biographies of artists used the life to shed light on the work, pathography uses the work to speculate about the life, if, in fact, it addresses the work at all. In many cases, the artist's work, the very thing that made him or her worthy of a biography in the first place, is virtually ignored.

Celebrity den-mother Arianna Huffington's book about Picasso elicited these comments:

To read Ms. Huffington's biography of Picasso (“Picasso: Creator and Destroyer”), one would think the artist were simply “a sadistic manipulator,” who worked out his destructive relationships with women in his paintings. To read Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Jackson Pollock (“Jackson Pollock: An American Saga”), one would think the painter were simply the self-destructive product of a dysfunctional childhood, who managed to translate the proddings of his unconscious onto canvas.

These books do little to help us understand their subjects' artistic development; they ignore the role that craft, imagination, historical tradition, intellectual convictions and the influence of colleagues have played in shaping their oeuvres. Instead, the painters' work is baldly explained in Freudian paint-by-numbers terms as simple collections of autobiographical allusions, or mechanical transcriptions of unconscious feelings. As a result, the reader gets no appreciation of the painters' artistic achievement, no understanding of the mysteries of the creative process; one gets only depressing portraits of dysfunctional human beings.

Mr. Naifeh and Mr. Smith, and Ms. Huffington, write with a tone of arrogant assurance, as if they and they alone have the goods on their subjects. In Ms. Huffington's case, she also makes clear her complete contempt for Picasso, referring to him as a “totalitarian,” a “hyena preying on others' weaknesses,” an artist who “used razor blades in his life as creatively as he used them in his art.”

The pop culture's attempt to make things subjective and easy, to diminish in order to make an effort to understand unnecessary, or derogate in order to allow the audience to feel good about itself, to titillate and deplore, is derived from postmodernist self-absorption.