Artistic misdemeanors
MANILA, Philippines - Who would win in a triple threat tag team cage match with Mel Gibson, Amy Winehouse and Kanye West if their partners were Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, and Chris Brown, respectively?
The first pair definitely has an advantage. Aside from being experienced actors on and off screen (Mel more than Charlie, obviously), the two have both garnered notoriety for being anti-Semitic alcoholics with a history of domestic violence. The ladies, Amy and Lindsay — who at one point were connected via the Ronson siblings — are tabloid staples. If they’re not getting their nip slips and stoned mug shots snapped by the paparazzi, they’re making first class reservations for rehab. Finally there’s Kanye and Chris, two guys who put the douche in douche bag. One of them crushed Taylor Swift’s moment in the sun while the other crushed Rihanna’s face. It’s an episode of Celebrity Deathmatch that one can only wish for.
Lindsay polishing her enabler with the mythical rack Photos from GQ.com These people are the crème de la crème of artists behaving badly. They are the antithesis to every scandal-free Disney star that ever walked the face of the earth. This is an irony, by the way. Both Lizzie Maguire and Hannah Montana also had a brush with their bad sides.
Natalie Portman said it quite accurately when she said, “I never said I was a role model.” She demonstrated that point by rapping, cussing, and beating the living daylights out of people in the very same SNL skit. Of course, that was a parody, but it highlights the idea very well: Artists are people, too.
Perhaps this is what the academy was thinking when they handed over five major Grammys, including Best New Artist, to Amy Winehouse in 2008? This decision, though, was met with wave after wave of criticism. Natalie Cole, who presented one of her awards, even had this to say: “It’s not right for her to be able to have her cake and eat it, too. She needs to get herself together.”
At the Cannes Film Festival just this past week, director Lars von Trier was declared persona non grata after making pro-Nazi comments during a press conference. Despite this, his film Melancholia was still nominated for the Palme d’Or, proof that art supersedes the artist.
People are either forgiving or forgetful. After a year of “I’mma let ya finish” memes, Kanye West regained the respect of both fans and critics with his release of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. West put his emotional baggage to good use and transformed his mischief into a masterpiece. The album hit number one in the Billboard charts and got rave reviews from top magazines like Rolling Stone.
Don’t let Kobe Bryant’s recently-exposed homophobic streak fool you. This one likes balls. Charlie Sheen, after getting fired from Two and a Half Men, decided to set up a Twitter account. His “bi-winning” mantra set the microblogging network ablaze. Within a week after joining the site, Sheen already gained almost a million followers who didn’t care if the guy was tweeting about his newfound love for chocolate milk or having tiger blood run through his veins. But wait a minute; this is just Charlie Sheen being his bipolar self. Where is the art in there? Why are people gobbling him up?
Kanye and that infamous mouth Purists will say there’s a line separating true artists from mere celebrities. A polarizing example would be Lady Gaga and her Born This Way tirade. So far, the critics like it, and the massive downloads crashing Amazon’s server prove that fans are digging it, too. Yet there are still haters taking to the web who consider Gaga’s artistry cheap theatrics.
But what is art, really? Oscar Wilde defined it as the conversion of an idea to an image. It doesn’t have to be a photograph or a painting, it can be a performance. At the end of the day, it’s all an act. All these celebrities are performance artists with their own eccentricities and methods of madness magnified by the media and scrutinized closely by the public eye. They’re laying it all out, and we’re their harshest critics.
