I wouldn’t go that far. It’s certainly rife with the sort of nihilistic sensationalism he reveled in, but it’s not made up from whole cloth by any means. By accounts other than his own, Dalí really did behave antisocially towards a lot of the people in his life.
Well, being an asshole is all about actions. But if you mean is there a difference between lying about being an asshole and being an asshole, then yes.
I don’t really think that applies to Dalí though since he wasn’t exactly lying.
Why do we care what the second rate hack Eric Blair thought of anyone?
Totally off topic, but Ozzy’s story was that the bat, presumably confused by the music, fell on the stage; he thought it was a rubber toy that someone in the audience had thrown (apparently people threw a lot of stuff at Ozzy shows), decided to bite its head off to amuse the audience, and was as surprised as anyone when it turned out to be real.
Which is to say, he played it more as a bizarre thing that happened to him than a badass thing he did. He certainly could still have made it up, though.
(Follow-up Ozzy story: another time someone threw a realistic baby doll on stage and he briefly thought “Oh God, we have to stop the show, they’ve gone too far this time.”)
Autobiographies belong in the ‘fiction’ section of the library.
If you go back a bit further, Caravaggio and Cellini both carried on working after committing murder.
Exactly, and he’s said in interviews that his biography was almost entirely BS. He enjoyed making up bizarre stories about himself and then contradicting them so that nobody would know the truth – as you say, part of his surrealist shtick. He was a brilliant painter and visionary artist but very much a self-conscious celebrity.
And in a nice circular closure, one of my pride-of-place paperbacks at home is a new-condition copy of Dick’s Man In the High Castle with the cover by Max Ernst (who’s already been invoked in this thread):
The definition given at college was;
“If I say it is art, and you agree, and it gets displayed, then it is art.”
And my college aesthetics professor would insist that art must generate a response from the viewer. That response could be revulsion, or joy, or amusement, or wonder, or any other emotion provoked by the experience. Art’s value lies in its ability to interact in some way with the viewer of the art.
The definition stands first, but I won’t disagree with the VALUE of art you give. If there is no emotional response to it then it fails as an artwork; which is one way to define Good Art and Bad Art, as it can’t be about methods or technique (Yeah, thanks, Clement Greenberg 
).
Which goes some way to explain the general public’s response to modern art as “my kid could paint like that, so it must be crap!” Yet, it got an emotional response, so…
For one to really appreciate modern art, you really, really need to learn about the context it was painted. I know after taking several courses I at least understood why someone painted like they did. I may still not like it for other reasons, but I can respect it for what it is.
ETA - oh and I think it was Picasso who said that the goal of any artist is to paint like children. Or something like that.
Absolutely. I’m still drawn toward particular artists and artworks, but I have gained a better respect for art outside of my own interests. Context really is everything!
Way back in college, a friend told me that Orwell had labeled Dali a sadist, or something to that effect – he (my friend) wasn’t more specific and I didn’t press him for details.
A year or two later, I had an English class where the professor suggested a delineation between modernist (art for art’s sake, elitist and even outright misanthropic e.g. Baudelaire, Yeats) and avant-garde (provocative, socially engaged, political: e.g. Surrealism, Mexican muralists, Situationist, punk rock). I asked the professor if he knew of the quote and what it was about; he suggested Dali be placed among the modernists and that maybe Orwell would have seen Dali on that side of the dichotomy. I’m thinking he had simply never read “Benefit of Clergy;” some years later I read about Dali’s professed support of Francoism but I’d never heard of this myself, until now.
Anyway, after that I saw Orwell as this stoic who didn’t or couldn’t enjoy anything, what with all the suffering in the world and that, by extension, he wouldn’t think anyone else could or should enjoy anything, either. Thant changed once I came across “A Nice Cup of Tea.”
EDIT:
Francisco Aranda, Bunel’s biographer:
when [The Andalusian Dog] is compared with the later and separate works of Bunuel and Dali, we see that not only the cinematographic quality, but also all the positive values of the film are those of Bunuel. Mary Meerson, of the Cinematheque Francais, who was in Paris in the thirties, has said that anything not good . . . must be attributed to Dali: some recherche images, the symbolist tendencies, an element of snobisme, the danger of avant-garde preciosity.
I quoted that here, which was originally a paper I wrote for the aformentioned English class (in case verbiage as clumsy as “thus the film techniques of two politically similar directors may be contrasted” doesn’t give it away).
See also: Art Pepper, Miles Davis…
Man, Orwell really is cherry picking.
Original context of the quote about the incident when he was 29:
Short version: he was drunk, she was an adult, she sexually harassed him, he kicked her. He obviously feels bad about it which is why he wrote it down.
I suppose Orwell and Dali were on opposing sides of the Spanish Civil War, but jeez, this is straight character assassination from him.
He says he’d drunk a bit of wine. That is not the same as being drunk. She touched his feet. He says nothing about feeling sexually harassed. He says nothing about her age. Your assumption to her majority is baseless. If in a contrarian effort to defend him, one twists the truth in the opposite direction as that of his critics, one does not encourage trust. Two bent truths do not make a straight truth.
Some people put paint in cups and pour it on the canvas and they are considered painters?
If by “cherry picking” you mean quoting verbatim a violent incident in which he stomped and trampled a woman “with all his might” for touching his foot…
Your favorite artist(or athlete, or famous person) probably is/was an asshole. High levels of narcissism are a key ingredient.
“we were having lunch with some friends at the seashore” “one of the girls in our group”
Sure, you could argue that maybe Dali had child friends, but I’m inclined to think not.
Like heck, young girl wasn’t even in the Orwell essay? It’s an adjective Jones added out of nowhere, together with the erasure of Orwell’s concession that the bridge incident was when Dali was aged 5.
I generally consider ‘an odd feeling of jealousy towards myself’ as Dali trying to come to terms with that assault. It is anyway not an unprovoked attack by Dali as the construction of that essay seems to suggest.
