This post sat in my drafts for a year, because I needed to work through some thoughts, which I did in these three posts.
A number of people have brought the following recent article to my attention:
Magicians Less Prone To Mental Disorders Than Other Artists
Given that the Magic Circle has a whole mental health programme to look after its members mental health I can’t help but feel that suggesting magic is a ticket to good mental health might be papering over some actual problems, but that’s not what this is really about.
Because everyone knows to be an artist you have to be nuts, right? You have to be so tortured by the delusional visions visiting you at night that the only respite is to capture them on canvas or in writing. The music of the damned plays in your head until you can share it with other people to alleviate the burden of being alone with forbidden knowledge.
Right? That’s what we all know about being creative, its a curse.
Right?
Wrong!¹
People think of mental illness totally wrong. The DSM² used to define mental ilness as disordered thinking. That is to say that there was ordered thinking, the way people are supposed to function, and anything else was a disorder. That of course led to the DSM defining homsexuality and autism as forms of mental illness rather than just parts of the natural tapestry of varied human experience. In the words of Gnarls Barkley, “Does that make me crazy?”
The new criteria for what makes a disorder is far more forgiving, specifying that abnormal thought patterns may be perfectly fine, what makes it a disorder is if it causes emotional or physical distress either to the patient themselves or those around them³.
For example, someone who consistently hallucinates the great gazoo giving them positive affirmations and helpful advice might be weird to most people, but it’s not really a problem.
I’m reminded of the excellent BBC adaptation of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel, in which the titular Jonathan summons a trickster fae but is unable to see or hear it. He realises later that the King, gripped by madness, was able to see the supernatural figure he sought. As a result of this he then looks to contract a similar neurological condition by eating a mouse with a parasite and is finally able to follow the fae through the mirror into his own realm.
What appeared to everyone else to be a mental illness, Jonathan recognised as a facet of human experience he could use to his advantage, and therefore not a disorder. It’s a good show, you should watch it.
Anyway, all this is to say that when the statistics show a higher incidence of mental illness among artists, this doesn’t mean lunacy lends itself to the act of creation. It means that the struggle of self expression, not only in a capitalist society but as a professional endeavour, puts a huge emotional strain on people who have worked hard to develop a set of skills and now must continually prove that those skills are valuable to a paying customer.
This manifests in a number of ways. Perhaps a poet could feel a deep connection to nature which fulled their desire to write long rhythmic verse about the beauty of the world, but they have ended up using their wordsmithery to produce slogans for shampoo bottles. An painter may obsessively study the human form to create dynamic evocatively posed scenes, but the best money is in furry porn, so they spend 14 hours a day drawing humanoid foxes in varied sexual positions⁴.
Aside from the mismatch of desire and opportunity, which is felt by many people whose careers took a left turn, artists also have to put up with the derision of their chosen vocation.
Most people in the creative industries recognise at least one of these:
- There’s no money but it’s good exposure.
- It’s not what I wanted, could you make a bunch of changes for no extra charge?
- Why don’t you get a real job?
- If you charged less you’d get more work.
- People actually pay for that?
- How much?
- we want you to pitch some new designs as the first step of the hiring process.
- What’s the point of a portrait when you can just take a photo?
- So when are you going to get your work in a proper gallery/publication/programme?
- My kid makes better pictures than that using Midjourney.
That last one is kind of a new phenomenon, but comparison to other artists has long been an issue.
Now I’ll confess that many of these sorts of things apply to magicians as well. There are plenty of magicians who work hard to learn expert sleight of hand and desperately struggle to have their creations recognised in the same light as the big names of Las Vegas, with their pictures 200ft high on the side of the theatre they exclusively perform in. For every Derren Brown there is a mentalist struggling to be seen as something other than a slightly creepy copycat. For every David Copperfield there is a middle aged man putting his granddaughter into a crudely painted knockoff zig-zag in a church hall, dreaming of the limelight, laughed off of Britain’s Got Talent.
But that headline is about statistics, and for every struggling artist writing their own material striving to emulate the greats, there are hundreds of people who charge £500 to show up at a wedding for an hour doing the same 4 card tricks over and over with a special deck they bought a month ago.
It takes years to become a sleight of hand expert, but at a party where everyone’s getting chatty after a few drinks, you can basically appear godlike with a double lift and a slip force.
Ironic really that while writers, painters, and musicians hone their talents for years under a constant barrage of criticism, magicians can pick up a self working trick on a Wednesday and receive personal adulation for it by the weekend. There’s the old saying that the true test of an artist is the ability to draw a perfect circle, and by that analogy in the magic world 99% of the applicants will happily turn up and just trace round the rim of an upturned glass to rapturous applause.
Magic has so many shortcuts in the creative process to get to an acceptable product that it’s almost a forerunner to ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.
So, as if you didn’t see this coming, the headline should really be, “Most magicians not as stressed out and depressed as other creatives because most magicians aren’t creative at all, opting instead to perform the first five tricks they learned for their entire careers.” Or “Buying a rotodraw⁵ is more impressive and less stress inducing than learning to draw from scratch.”
Nowhere is this more evident than in one particular dark blemish on the world of magic, a speedbump on the road to recognition of magic as an art form. An absolute carbuncle on the skyline of the magical arts, which I will discuss in my next post:
The Act.
¹ Be honest you knew that was coming before you clicked the link to read the full article.
² The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (of Mental Disorders) currently on its 5th edition, showing that it is keeping up with D&D, the other way to diagnose mental illnesses.
³ I’m massively simplifying here, one could argue that certain personality traits could be considered distressing to other people, but you can’t medicate or lock up people who listen to music on their phones on public transport. This kind of diagnosis is reserved for the criminally violent, such as the other passengers after 20 minutes of tinny hip-hop from a speaker the size of a contact lens.
⁴ No disrespect to the furries, they pay well for good art, and value their favourite artists. Furries are one community who roundly rejected the onslaught of AI art, recognising it as a force which would damage their tightly knit creative community. Solidarity with the furries.
⁵ Cutting room floor for this sentence had alrernative drawing tools, such as Pantograph, Spirograph, Paint by Numbers, and (for some reason) Etch-a-Sketch. That last one is utterly preposterous because drawing on an Etch-a-Sketch is a monumentally difficult task. I have nothing but respect for people who can produce even a vaguely recognisable figure on an Etch-a-Sketch.