What we talk about when we talk about dead artists
and, most recently, Jimmy Buffett. If you stop to think about it, many such outpourings for writers, actors and musicians are odd, even irrational.
Unlike other kinds of grief, this one does not stem from personal intimacy. If you ever interacted with a cherished author, it was probably during a book tour when, caffeinated to the eyeballs, she signed your copy of her novel and misspelled your name. Maybe you delude yourself that you once locked eyes with a frontman hero during a gig and that he smiled only for you. But you didn’t really know them, and they certainly didn’t know you.
Nor would you always have liked them if you had. Their books or songs may be touching and wise, but it is a biographical fallacy to assume that the work reflects an artist’s life or beliefs. Your favourites may indeed have been lovely people; or perhaps, beneath their curated images, they were spiky money-grubbers, consumed by rivalry or solipsists who drove their families nuts. Rarely do you know for sure.
Though the artists are gone, meanwhile, the art you prize is not. Death does not delete it—on the contrary, curiosity and nostalgia often drive up sales. The dead, it is true, write no more books and record no songs. Philip Roth will never set a novel in the era of Donald Trump; you will never hear another operatic Meat Loaf ballad. The cold reality, however, is that many artists’ best work was done long before their demise.
The sorrow makes more sense when a star dies young or violently. Had she not perished at 27, like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, who knows what music
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