Mitchell—embattled, difficult, demanding—gave us this explosive quote, so germane to our purposes here: “Most of my heroes are monsters, unfortunately, and they are men. If you separate their personalities from their art, Miles Davis and Picasso have always been my major heroes.” For Mitchell, separating the life from the art was not an aesthetic question, but a point of view necessary to her survival. In other words, she wasn’t confronting the problem as an audience member, but as an artist. In that way, I am like her. Just trying to figure out how to do it. Perhaps the monstrousness of
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