Artists Have to Die Before We Canonize Them

There’s also a suspiciously Catholic logic to the whole thing: first you suffer, then you die, then everyone agrees you were a genius.

Van Gogh struggles in obscurity; after death, he becomes practically the patron saint of tortured artists. Kafka wants his manuscripts burned; posterity canonizes him anyway. Emily Dickinson spends much of her life out of public view; later, she enters the literary holy orders.

It’s almost as if the cultural establishment borrowed the machinery of sainthood: suffering establishes authenticity, death removes any inconvenient objections, and then come the relics — letters, notebooks, unfinished sketches, childhood bedrooms.

While alive: “Difficult, eccentric, commercially unsuccessful.”

After death: “Visionary. Prophet. Please don’t touch the glass.”

Apparently, in culture as in religion, canonization works better when the candidate can no longer comment on the process.