(no subject)

[proximoception]

Relatedly: narcissists can also go farther in music and film because they can delegate so much of the work. "Write me a really catchy melody to go with this thing I wrote about how I'm both the best and worst person who ever lived," Kanye says to a talented co-writer; "Do something really cool and operatic with slow motion and black and white to my dumb storyboards of a child falling out a window while his parents have sex in the shower," Von Trier says to his top-drawer DP.

And narcissists are famously able to inspire awed loyalty and a sense of their shared task's importance in their (generally otherwise quite abused) disciples. See Hitler, possibly?

Kernel of all this was my thinking about the narcissist sides of Greenaway and probably Taymor, which may be necessary to understanding how they can suck so appallingly (and inhumanly) at times.

Comments

[andalus.livejournal.com]

there is also the contrary, like when Björk in the late 90s decided she was going to write all her own songs instead of having her more-talented but less-interesting friends do most of the work. Which was good for one (great) album, then got progressively weirder.

Just because someone fails at execution doesn't mean they're a narcissist though.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

No, the mystery of suckiness abides. But they're such consistent overreachers, and what they do achieve is so strange, that people who think art is a big splash of whatever kind adore them as consistently big splashers, so the rest of us know who they are. They tend to be the readiest examples of large-scale sucking.