Loneliness of the Lunatic

Can loneliness be commodified, fetishized? It's done every day, & too often it is the loneliness of the artist. Case in point: Henry Darger, the outsider artist par excellence. The fetishized commodity, here & everywhere, works from two cheapshot angles: sympathetically ("aww, what a sad man") & romantically (the loneliness of all great artists will be redeemed, in a sort of relentless art-historical Rapture, by posterity). Both of these angles point away from the art itself. The former relies on biography, the latter on myth (in a sense, biography writ large & abstracted).



Renowned art critic John Berger tired long ago of the romance with artistic loneliness. "He is lonely in the same way as a lunatic is lonely," Berger wrote of Picasso. "Because it seems to the lunatic that, since he never meets opposition, he can do anything." Picasso was less a man than a tempest, to whom loneliness was scarcely an obstacle. But Darger was no Picasso: his creative flights were so vagrant that they left the public grounded, scratching their heads, their esthetic vocabulary compressed into that single hollow phrase: "How ... interesting."