Worshipping Artistic Greatness

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

Much has been lately about cancel culture and writers not being morally up to snuff. I wrote about this on my old blog several times. Until I read What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann? (The New Yorker), did it occur to me the problem may be more in the worshipper than the worshipped. I do not think I ever worshipped an artist. As much as I admire Kurt Vonnegut, I would not worship him. It is not so hard for me to like The Rolling Stones without worshipping them; if Altamont does explain why, then Dirty Work should. Why should I expect an artist to be a better person than me? No, the real question should be if the work is better than the person, better than what I could do myself?

This is the paragraph that crystallized the idea for this post:

It is not impossible to imagine what Mann might have said if the dilemma of Sontag’s shame had been presented to him. He had long been brooding over the problem of the charismatic artist, over the hidden dangers of aesthetic cults. The topic floats through Sontag’s then favorite novel, “The Magic Mountain,” and it engulfs “Doctor Faustus,” the tale of a genius and a nation gone mad. Mann might have argued that there is not only a moral but also an artistic virtue in being outwardly boring and banal. It is a hedge against mania. The worship of greatness leads, at best, to disillusionment and, at worst, to the insanity unleashed by the Wagnerian Hitler. Every pilgrimage is suspect: Mann scorned the Wagner shrine in Bayreuth on those grounds. “Only for very young people,” he wrote, “are admiration and adoration the same thing.” 

As much as The Magic Mountain awes me, my feelings towards Thomas Mann are more mundane: how did you come to write such a novel?

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