SET 62
Anti-Semitism turns up so often in the rsums of 20th-century artists, in fact, that it almost seems part of the job description, and critics and commentators have sometimes tried to mitigate if not excuse it. Wagner, they point out, had Jewish friends. Eliot was a devout, churchgoing Anglican - surely not a "bad" person in any extreme way. So for now, let's leave anti-Semitism off the list. How about misogyny, or generally creepy behavior toward women? Picasso probably takes the prize here: of the seven main women in his life, two went mad and two killed themselves. His standing could be in jeopardy, though, if the crime novelist Patricia Cornwell ever succeeds in proving her conviction - argued at length and at great expense in her book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper- Case Closed - that the British painter Walter Sickert was in fact the famous serial killer.
Speaking of killing, Norman Mailer in a rage once tried to kill one of his wives. The painter Caravaggio and the poet and playwright Ben Jonson both killed men in duels or brawls. Genet was a thief, Rimbaud was a smuggler, Byron committed incest, Flaubert paid for sex with boys. So case closed, one is tempted to say, invoking Ms. Cornwell's phrase: anti-Semitism, misogyny, racism (I left that out, but there are too many examples to cite), murderousness, theft, sex crimes. That's not to mention the drunkenness, drug-taking, backstabbing, casual adultery and chronic indebtedness that we know attended (or attends) the lives of so many people who make unquestionably good art. Why should we be surprised or think otherwise? Why should artists be any better than the rest of us?
The question - "Can bad people create good art?" - is misleading because badness and goodness in this formulation don't refer to the same thing. In the case of the artist, badness or goodness is a moral quality or judgment; in the case of his art goodness and badness are terms of aesthetic merit, to which morality does not apply. The conductor Daniel Barenboim, a Jew, is a champion of Wagner's music, for example, and has made a point of playing it in Israel, where it is hardly welcome. His defense is that while Wagner may have been reprehensible, his music is not. Barenboim likes to say that Wagner did not compose a single note that is anti-Semitic. And the disconnect between art and morality goes further than that: not only can a "bad" person write a good novel or paint a good picture, but a good picture or a good novel can depict a very bad thing. Think of Picasso's Guernica or Nabokov's Lolita , an exceptionally good novel about the sexual abuse of a minor, described in a way that makes the protagonist seem almost sympathetic.
Yet art, when you experience it, seems ennobling: it inspires and transports us, refines our discriminations, enlarges our understanding and our sympathies. Surely, we imagine, we are better people because of it. And if art does this much for those of us who merely appreciate it, then it must reflect something even better and truer and more inspiring in the lives and character of the people who actually create art. We cling to these notions - especially that art morally improves us - against all evidence to the contrary, for as the critic George Steiner has famously pointed out, the Holocaust contradicts them once and for all. "We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening," Steiner writes, "that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning." Or as Walter Benjamin once wrote: "At the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism." Another, possibly more interesting way to think about the question is to cross out bad and change it to good: Can good people make good art? Or to make it a little harder: Can good people make great art? The answer here might seem to be equally self-evident. There are countless artists who seemingly lead decent, morally upstanding lives, who don't beat their wives, slur the Jews, or even cheat on their taxes. There are many more of these, one wants to say, than of the other sort, the Wagners, Rimbauds, Byrons, et al., who are the exception rather than the rule. And yet the creation of truly great art requires a degree of concentration, commitment, dedication, and preoccupation - of selfishness, in a word - that sets that artist apart and makes him not an outlaw, exactly, but a law unto himself.
1)What is the tone of the paragraph?
a)Analytical, b)Argumentive, c)Cynical, d)Critical
2)What is the main idea of the passage?
a)Bad person can make good art.
b)Creation of great art is possible being in commonplace.
c)Challenging the notion: bad people cannot make good art.
d)Asserts certain degree of qualities set great artists apart from the others.
3)What could be a possible paragraph that will follow the excerpt?
a)Will state about anti-Semitic artists to explain how they created great art in spite of going through upheavals in their life.
b)Will state about why, so called, good people failed to create great art.
c)Will state about how great artists tend to live for their art more than for others.
d)Will state about a great artist whose domestic record is less inspiring than his artistic one.
I will refuse to die till I bring justice to all those Sundays I have lost from my life.