Head to [ Ссылка ] to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ACCORDINGTOALINA

Taylor Swift's new album, The Tortured Poets Department, is here and generating ~discourse~ about her personal life, politics, public persona, and pretty much everything she's ever said and done.
More importantly (to me and other literature nerds) it has started a conversation around what it means to be a tortured poet/artist and who gets to call themselves that. So of course I couldn't resist chiming in with my two cents.
In this video, I try to reconstruct a sort of genealogy of the "tortured artist/poet", from Ancient Greece and a dubious Plato quote, to the 18th and 19th centuries with the Romantics and the poèts maudits. Finally, I try to answer the social media rage-fuelled question: can billionaires make art? and is telling them they can't actually helping the rest of us?

timestamps:
00:00 - Taylor Swift is not a tortured poet
2:41 - billionaires can't be tortured
3:10 - a brief and subjective history of the tortured poet
7:23 - is Taylor Swift a bad writer or is she just rich?
14:11 - why gatekeeping "tortured-ness" doesn't help marginalised artists
18:56 - I'm pretty sure she's talking about Matty Healy
19:26 - The Tortured Poets Department and the suffering aesthetic

link to sources and other things mentioned:

quick overview of Romanticism
[ Ссылка ]

tortured artist wiki page
[ Ссылка ]

The Tortured Artist Trope (in reference to the use of *that* Plato quote)
[ Ссылка ]

The Unromantic Truth About Tortured Poets
[ Ссылка ]

article about research on creativity and "tortured artists"
[ Ссылка ]

link to the research
[ Ссылка ]

David Lynch compilation on art and depression by youtube user CrazyMaxerre
[ Ссылка ]

footage I use at the end is from Taylor Swift's new music video for the song Fortnight, in case there are still people who haven't seen it yet.

Also, a little note to zealous swifties: this video is not meant as a personal attack on Taylor, it's a conversation about people's ideas about art in relation to Taylor Swift as a brand, so please be civil in your responses to it. I'm a bit ambivalent about even writing this because I hate the way people who criticize TS rush to paint her fanbase as a deranged mob, but I have had a couple of intense responses on another video where I make the tiniest observation about her and I would like it if we could keep the comment section a safe space for everyone to express their opinions.
I understand that when you admire someone it's difficult to see other criticize that person, but I promise nothing anyone will say in the comment section of a youtube with 20k subs could ever touch someone as influential as Taylor. We are all tiny insects on the windshield of the private jet that is her life.

свернуть