The Perks of Being a Figment

Mea culpa, my imaginary children

‘Lo child,

They say that every painting is a self-portrait, that an artist can’t help but depict themselves in their work, but I feel that’s got more to do with our impulse to personify everything — like we discussed in our spicy talk about deontology, we have a pretty universal human need to put a human shape on whatever we encounter. We learn about wars based on the famous names who fought, name wildlife and locations based on the first white man to find them, just can’t get interested in any topic if it doesn’t have a smiling face attached to it that we can get all parasocial with. We like to read art in order to understand the artist, which is both foolish and potentially damaging to that artist in a way that might be hard to understand if you’re not one — look at the way success hit Davey Wreden, creator of The Stanley Parable. I’ve spent the last fifteen years sorely tempted to write an “oh, GIRL” kind of rant plotting out Sinead O’Connor’s evidently disastrous romantic history based solely on her lyrics over the years, but I don’t do it because that would be invasive and cruel, me deciding that liking someone’s art gives me license to judge their life.

Sidestepping the “death of the author” discussion because it’s a shallow moral debate that was already boring centuries before people started trotting it out on Twitter it to feel better about their Harry Potter merch, I don’t think every painting is a self-portrait. I think, like the famous Visscher panorama of London, every painting is an impossible landscape, a view of the world from a perspective that can exist only this once, that no one else will ever be able to attain. Everything an artist makes is a depiction of the world they see from where they’re standing, and we can read the artist by this — we can try to draw conclusions about them based on how they view the world, sure — but it will never be more useful than guesswork, because we can’t know how much of the picture is fabricated, made out of the same cloth as the artist and thus carrying their DNA, and how much is the world we all experience, filtered and changed by the artist’s perception and skill.

Every artist has to find their own answer to the “nothing new under the sun” quandary, the problem of realizing that true…