Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!
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I suppose I’m the only one around here who likes Dali. I always have.
Since we’re seeing these confessions at third hand, I wonder what his attitude was about doing such violence? Was he smugly proud of himself, or was he looking back in regret? Even St. Augustine confessed to some pretty awful behavior. And fish.
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The stuffed “cats” that the dude is juggling are physically smaller than the live ones they show in the non-juggling close ups 
Dali was probably also a sympathizer with fascism. I personally think his artwork is spectacular, but he was probably a rubbish person.
https://www.countercurrents.org/dali-navarro121203.htm
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What is that, a Metro for ANTS?
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Not any more.
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We congratulate ALL our Condescension Derby winners! But you indisputably came in first, Brad.
Yaaaaay! You’re so good. You’re so good and clever.
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“Benefit of Clergy” – that’s a pretty sick burn.
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It’s sad that some artists are just monsters. Frankly, I think Dali can be considered overrated as there were contemporary artists in the Surrealist tradition that don’t get as much attention from Spain. I can’t remember the name of the guy but he did work that pretty damn good IMO.
There’s always a stuffed cat truther.
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But, Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.
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There’s more to it than that. The point Orwell makes is not that people loved Dali in spite of his awfulness, but because of it.
There’s some doubt over Lewis Carroll’s intentions toward the young girls he liked to hang out with, but he didn’t put a chapter in Alice in Wonderland where Alice is raped and then get invited to tell rape stories at high-society dinners.
That really wouldn’t fly in today’s culture either, but back in the 70s we had Roman Polanski going on TV saying “Everyone wants to fuck young girls!”
The important thing is not to denounce him as a cad who ought to be horsewhipped, or to defend him as a genius who ought not to be questioned, but to find out why he exhibits that particular set of aberrations.
What was it about the 20th Century that made the rich and powerful not only tolerate someone like Dali or Polanski, but actually admire their unashamed wickedness?
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Why just the 20th Century? Much older than that.
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It also turned out that Dali was a Francoist, so I would have expected Orwell, to be even harsher had he known this at the time.
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I mean specifically that much of the art of the 20th Century was intended to shock and offend its audience, and that people with money actively wanted to be shocked and offended.
It may be that all the painters of the 18th Century were rapists and murderers, but they wouldn’t have got far putting that on their resumés.
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If you’ve never seen his paintings full size, in real life, declaring them “third rate” is the worst kind of internet-grump whining. Actually, even calling them third rate when just seeing in them in a book is pretty ridiculous.
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…not in New York
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Pot meet kettle? (OK, so Orwell was a relatively young man when his homophobia and anti-Semitism were most apparent, but not younger than Dali in the period described in the autobiography.)
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I have given my thoughts on the matter before, but I do try to separate sometimes accomplishments or art over who the individual is… But there’s a certain threshold where their personal failings are just too large for me to ignore. In Dali’s case these revelations don’t necessarily change my enjoyment of his art because I wasn’t particularly a big fan or not, but knowing what his failings are do give me some additional ways in which to analyze his work and ideas.
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