Artist as Outlaw Day
We hope you spent last week dancing like Cuckoos and feel refreshed and ready to get down to some serious creativity. Of course, the word “serious” is open for interpretation when it comes to creativity and art. Some of the most controversial artists have written comedies or drawn cartoons. Artists such as Lenny Bruce, the comic who was jailed for what was at the time, 1964, deemed to be “obscene.” He died of a drug overdose two years later, only to be posthumously pardoned in 2003, and now is regarded as one of the most provocative and trenchant comedians of his day.
That’s some serious stuff.
Truth-tellers throughout history have been branded as threats to their societies and punished. The artists Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe both produced photographs that so shocked some people that they were banned in places. And the lists of banned books in the 1950s prompted Ray Bradbury to write the dystopian Fahrenheit 451, a novel that sadly seems to have been prescient in many places.
But human beings are wonderfully defiant when it comes to creative works. Artists love to be loved, just like everyone else, but they also love to defy and shock and knock down silly rules and boundaries and “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature” as Hamlet says, whether or not other people really want to see what the mirror reflects.
Some of the most defiant, and most creative, people we know are cats. They really don’t care what you think of their shenanigans. And they make excellent muses and familiars. First readers—not so much.