The belief that artists are entitled to be morally careless--that great art excuses everything--has proved to be one of the more tenacious parts of our Romantic inheritance. In Hollywood movies about artists, the characters who challenge the hero's license to be inconsiderate--the landlady who hassles van Gogh about the appalling state of his garret, the neighbor who yells at Beethoven to keep the noise down, the sulky wife who insists that Johnny Cash stop canoodling with June Carter--are invariably presented as dreary philistines who must be ignored or defeated if truth and beauty are to triumph.
Zoe Heller
Zoe Heller
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