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In conservative corners of the art world, sighs of relief greeted last week's Turner Prize winner. Not only does Tomma Abts practise the traditional craft of applying brush to canvas, but she also delivered an acceptance speech devoid of both expression and interest.
Eschewing the trappings of today's celebrity-sodden creative culture, Abts's success seemed to signal a return to the good old days when artists, flinching visibly in the limelight, let art speak for itself.
But the reclusive artist is no more beauty's true friend than the bullish artiste-celebre, eager to make a performance out of personality.
Since 1550, when Vasari published his Lives of the Artists, the linking of artists' lives to their works has been almost unavoidable. But Vasari's tales pale before the autobiography of his Florentine contemporary, Benvenuto Cellini. The Autobiography
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- Cellini's greatest work - records a life of scandal, intrigue, sex and death, providing rich testimony to the role of personality politics in the flowering of Italian culture
Irresistibly operatic, Cellini's life was set to music by Hector Berlioz, another who not only gave his life to art but brought real art to living, theatrically lambasting misguided colleagues in the press and pursuing love and despair across Europe.
Indeed, from Balzac to Toulouse-Lautrec, 19th-century artists grew well used to living in, and off, the limelight. And from Proust's sublimation of a socialite's Paris, via Picasso - as fickle with his style of painting as with his friends and lovers - to the trail of intimate detritus left by our own Tracey Emin, the past century has shown little signs of wishing its artists to keep mum.
So why start now?
FIRST POSTED DECEMBER 14, 2006
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