The Wall Street Journal-20080119-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Leisure - Arts -- Sightings- The Death Effect- The mystery of posthumous fame
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Leisure & Arts -- Sightings: The Death Effect; The mystery of posthumous fame
Is dying really a shrewd career move? Cynics, art dealers and humorists seem to think so. The French painter Jean-Francois Millet fakes his own death in Mark Twain's play "Is He Dead?" in order to push up his prices: "A painter has so much more talent when he's dead. Indeed the deader he is, the better he is." Dawn Powell used a similar plot device in her comic novel "The Wicked Pavilion," in which an unsuccessful artist touches up the half-finished canvases of a deceased colleague and passes them off as authentic.
Both of these examples are, of course, fictional (though Millet was a real-life painter on whom Twain hung his made-up plot). Nevertheless, it's not unusual for the reputations of comparatively little-known artists to take a sharp turn upward when they die, a phenomenon whose implications have been known to border on the tragic. In the last years of his life, Bela Bartok was so obscure that he and his family actually had trouble making ends meet. It wasn't until after he died of leukemia in 1945 that he finally came to be widely regarded as a great composer -- too late for the resulting royalties on his music to ease his earthly lot.
On the other hand, the reputations of many artists who were well known in their lifetimes have gone to the grave with them. Arthur Rubinstein was one of the most successful classical pianists of the 20th century, but his recordings, unlike those of his arch-rival, Vladimir Horowitz, stopped selling soon after his death in 1982. It was as if his charismatic onstage physical presence had been necessary in order to persuade listeners of the artistic quality of his exciting but sometimes slapdash playing.
What is it about the demise of an artist that so often triggers a reconsideration of his significance? In the short run, the Death Effect arises in part from the publication of obituaries that discuss the whole of his achievement, admiringly or otherwise. Most of us, after all, have a tendency to take the continuing output of long-lived creative artists for granted, in much the same way that a resident of New York City may never get around to visiting a local landmark like the Empire State Building. If you forget to read their latest novel or see their new movie . . . well, there'll always be another one. Their death is thus a natural occasion for editors to commission articles that seek to sort them out and sum them up.
Not only can such articles stimulate renewed critical debate, but they may also have the unintended consequence of bringing a freshly deceased artist to the attention of younger readers hitherto unfamiliar with his work. I won't be surprised, for instance, if a considerable number of people under the age of 50 who had never heard of George MacDonald Fraser prior to his death earlier this month should be inspired to sample his witty "Flashman" novels by reading the admiring tribute by Robert Messenger that appeared in Thursday's Journal.
Another aspect of the Death Effect is the undeniable but nonetheless macabre fact that an artist's death makes it easier for critics to sum him up -- and for dealers to set a price on his work. You can't trust a living artist not to lose his touch or change stylistic direction, much less to keep his output low enough to make it more valuable to collectors. Once he's dead, though, critics and catalogers are free to do their stuff, and what economists call the "scarcity effect" comes into play. One reason why Vermeer's paintings are so fabulously valuable is because there are only 35 of them. If there were 350, they wouldn't be any less beautiful, but they'd be worth a lot less on the open market.
Sometimes, though, the mills of the gods of posthumous renown grind slowly. The jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, who died last month at the age of 82, was a superstar for most of his long life. He was also prolific to a fault, releasing some 200 albums in the course of his seven-decade career. Now that he's dead, how well is he likely to be remembered by future generations? My guess is that Peterson's place in the pantheon of jazz is secure, but that once the Death Effect wears off, his reputation will enter a protracted period of eclipse. Why? Because it will take a long time for critics and scholars to sift through his vast output and decide what portion of it is worth remembering.
The good news, if you want to call it that, is that death, in addition to being a smart career move, also has a way of making frustrated artists patient. In his lifetime Gustav Mahler was widely regarded as a great conductor with an annoying habit of writing overblown symphonies on the side. He knew better. "My time will come," he said, and it did -- but not until a half-century after his death in 1911. Thanks in large part to the advocacy of Leonard Bernstein, Mahler finally became one of the world's most frequently played classical composers.
Too bad he wasn't around to cash the checks.
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Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Saturday and blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at [email protected].
