Valentines day yesterday. Through my teenage years, Feb 14th was an annual ordeal. At my boarding school (which was founded on a military ethos) we lived in dormitories, and each morning the dormitory mail was piled on a table. The prevailing culture was for members of the Rugby team, and anyone else who felt they could get away with it, to take the piss out of anyone at any opportunity, and mail provided a daily opportunity for this. Mail on Feb 14th especially so, and the chief recipients of verbal abuse were those such as myself who were not recipients of any mail.
It’s not that I was particularly ugly, or unpleasant, or unsociable, but I never had the “charisma” that turns a pleasant face into an attractive one.
A few days ago, I received a round-robin email from the Live Art Development Agency appealing for participants in an event. The artist listed a series of required qualities, which included “Charisma”.
I would define charisma as being a quality that inspires people to follow. Collins defines charisma as “a special personal quality or power of an individual making him capable of influencing or inspiring large numbers of people”. Or her, presumably.
Which left me thinking: “Is charisma befitting to an artist?”.
The obvious answer is “Yes – artists must want to influence people, to be followed … there lies the route to success.” However, if one subscribes to the prevailing ethos that audiences might be encouraged to make up their own minds about work they are viewing, then charisma might be a set-back. How can an audience make up their own minds when they’re inspired to slavishly imitate the artist?
From a psychological standpoint, we vilify people who express things that we have, but which we don’t want.
For instance, we all (well, most of us), have little pockets of misery, but they don’t feel good, and we don’t want them. Miserable people, who express this, we push away and marginalise.
Other classes of people who have this “anti-charisma” include the physically disabled, ugly, mentally ill, confused, homeless, poverty-stricken, ignorant, naïve, criminal, self-negating, etc.
What about “charisma”? In this case, we tend to admire people who express things that we don’t have, but which we want. Following my (incomplete) list of anti-charismatic traits above, this includes people who express happiness, physical perfection (e.g. sports champions), beauty, equanimity, certainty, security, wealth, knowledge, wisdom, goodness, self-belief etc.
To reinforce charisma, one can turn to some ritual techniques for asserting authority: formality (e.g. a propensity for formal dress), and an appeal to tradition. Or, if one is inspiring people against authority, then the opposite of these – informality and novelty.
The traits of charisma and anti-charisma are often socially defined. At my school, boys suspected of, or known to have, gay tendencies, were treated particularly badly. In the dining hall, where most kids ate their meals sitting with groups of friends, the gay kids were forced to sit in a corner on their own. Transgressing this custom would usually lead to extreme violence. Oddly for the era, my family background was supportive to minorities who suffered prejudice, so when thrown into this milieu I purposefully acted against it – deciding to keep company with the gay kids … a decision which led to 4 years of anti-charismatic hell.
Of course, the charismatic kids in this milieu were those who expressed exaggerated hetero-sexuality … effectively, those who conformed, and towed the party line.
However, charismatic people are not always swimming with the tide. Bhagwan Rajneesh was one such, who inspired millions of devoted followers, by expressing bliss, certainty, beauty, extreme formality, equanimity, security, knowledge, wisdom and goodness … and latterly even extreme wealth … but who led people into sexual freedom from a sexually repressive society.
Other extreme charismatics from the last 100 years or so include Alistair Crowley, Rudolf Steiner, Adolf Hitler, John Lennon, Winston Churchill, John Kennedy, Sid Vicious, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.
While many Rock musicians are renowned as much for their charisma as their music, and charismatic visual artists certainly sell more paintings, it doesn’t seem to be a quality for which many visual artists are remembered: Google “charismatic artist” and not much comes back.
So, I’ll continue to evade charisma and leave my readers (if, indeed, there are any – [oops, a bit of anticharismatic self-negation there]) with my original question: “Is charisma befitting to an artist?”.
