Do we have artists and art, or performers of success who could have disabilities or illnesses?

Comment on opinion essay by Pamela Paul, “Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, and the Reality of Imperfection,” New York Times, November 27, 2022:

Do we have artists and art, or performers of success who could have disabilities or illnesses?

People have difficulties. Art is one way of dealing with one's experience; treatments for 'mental illness' are another. Moreover, labelling people as 'mentally ill' tends to deny them the opportunity of dealing with their experience by way of making sense of it (something art shares with psychoanalysis, except that the former is public; but psychiatry excludes this possibility intrinsically and by definition). Indeed, what 'mental health' treatments do is treat your experience as dysfunctional, which means treating it as behavior and applying to it behavioral norms. Now consider that pop musicians and other performing artists are often packaged and regarded by the public as performing being a person (the star is an exemplary person entitled to perform publicly their personality), and to perform personality as performance and success. So the star comes well-packaged like a thoroughly made, and so perfected, commodity. But people are not perfect, they have difficulties and suffer. Psychiatry sometimes has defined mental illness simply as "problems in living" (as American psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan put it), but that only tells us that the idea of mental illness gives us the set of persons who can be rejected and excluded from the society of normal people because they are susceptible to finding that in living their lives they face what used to be the questions of ethics: how to live a good life, in any sense. They are so susceptible because not all of their life and work come off automatically like using a tool that is completely transparent, like an extension of one's hand, so that it isn't even noticed. In other words, we imagine that stars are perfected persons who have no problems because they don't really a life at all, and are not really persons but carefully packaged consumer products.

Clearly the ideas of normality and success and mental health and illness that are involved here are absurd. And clearly too, all of this points to the need for a different way of thinking about artists, and those artists who are celebrities and those who think that success as an artist is this perfected appearance. It is also notable that female beauty traditionally is an ideal of a perfected or naturally perfect appearance. This again is behavior, not experience, and it is experience that is the stuff of art. Experience that is chaotic and difficult to work with, to transform into an order and thus some beautiful thing.

We need different ideas of art, particularly when we live in a time when social media actually make possible forms of creativity that can be engaged in by many more people, maybe everyone. At the same time that they also are conduits of clichéd ways of thinking and reacting and generally what we may as well call a learned and produced stupidity.

Being an artist is not being a celebrity. Celebrities cultivate an excellence that is admired because it is that. But for artists at work, process matters as much as product, and the product is not supposed to be merely excellent, but meaningful, interesting. (And that is not a product but a process: an artwork that is interesting is valued for the process of thinking that it provokes in viewers or audiences.) Indeed, in twentieth century art and aesthetics the concept of the beautiful was largely replaced by that of the interesting. Interesting works provoke thought. Mere excellence only provokes admiration, and the desire for it hysterical disorders like anorexia. Pity the stars, for they are victims of an art industry that treats them like performers in a sport. We admire great sportsmen, but they are not artists because a sports tournament is only about excellence, and does not have a meaning. Artworks are objects that function as complex thoughts, whose purpose is to help us understand our world and how we live in it. The problem of anxious celebrities is a result of the displacement of the important work of pop music and other arts onto a consumer culture. But if you listen to any of the songs of these musicians, you understand something different than the piteous call for more therapy that the Times article reflects. Our performing artists suffer from the consequences of the industrial production of very inadequate and incorrect ways of thinking about art of any kind.