Abandoned by Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of prosperity, the Bohemians of Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century Paris had to struggle to find the “centimes” to pay for their next espresso, but at least they could console themselves with the purity of their creative souls. Uncorrupted by “le sale capitalisme” (dirty capitalism,) they were immortalized in Edgar Degas’ painting, “The Absinthe Drinker,” which depicts a dejected but well-dressed Parisian lady deep in an absinthe-infused reverie as hazy as any opium dream, seated in a cafe next to a man who appears to be either a street drunk or a brilliant Bohemian masquerading as same. The Bohemians gave Western society the odd notion that artistic expression is somehow best nourished by completely withholding monetary nourishment. The vivid image of the starving artist in a sordid garret was born, no matter that it might be as beautiful a garret as Van Gogh’s room in his yellow house in Arles, in the South of France.
Speaking of yellow, several years ago my brother Bliss Kolb wrote, directed and produced a brilliant play on the theme of creativity and prosperity. Titled “The Yellow Kid,” it was based on the lead character in an early newspaper comic strip called “Hogan’s Alley,” which was first published in 1895 in Joseph Pulitzer’s “New York World.” A polemic advocating for social justice and the betterment of New York City’s down-and-out tenement dwellers, “the Yellow Kid” became so popular that William Randolph Hearst woke up and took note. With visions of cash from future newspaper sales, he lured the comic artist, Richard Outcault, away to his own paper, “The New York Journal American.” Thus it was that Hearst’s papers came to be associated with a new phrase, “yellow journalism.”
Suddenly Outcault had a chance to earn a decent income, so after a bit of agonizing, at least according to the play’s version of events, he defected to Hearst’s paper. Lakshmi appeared to be smiling, but there was a catch: the “Journal American” was a bourgeois enterprise driven by Victorian notions of family and propriety. There was no place in it for a liberal polemic like “Hogan’s Alley,” so the yellow kid metamorphosed into a character upholding the commercial values of New York’s rising middle class, while turning his back on the scrappy, impoverished lads who had made his strip so popular. Outcault had sold out for cash, and the play imagines that he made a bargain with the Devil, trading away his creativity for a regular high income.
Is this inevitable? Does an artist need to turn away from Lakshmi’s coins in order to preserve his creativity intact? I think not. Monet lived a happy, bourgeois existence at Giverny, where late in life he produced his lily pond masterpieces. Picasso also became well-heeled, without any observable dent in his fierce creativity. These examples demonstrate that the enemy of creativity is not regular income or even wealth. It is instead a three-pronged affair of laziness, complacency and insecurity or depression. Any or all of those demons can strike any artist, just as they can strike any spiritual seeker, regardless of whether he or she is rich or poor.
Bird of Spirit 