Most of what you probably believe about the role of the artist in society comes straight from the pen of Symbolist poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé and his cohort: Verlaine, Rilke, Rimbaud, Yeats, and others. It goes something like this: the artist is the unique visionary whose insight into the world is so powerful, so inherently salutary, that the artwork needs no justification outside of itself. Its only obligation is to its own internally created reality. And that work of art, when out among people, must necessarily enlighten anyone who would trouble to probe its self-referential obscurities. The myth of the artist as the high priest of the dark, creative demiurge is so airtight in Western culture that any artist who behaves differently risks being accused of not being an artist at all.
