Talk:Tortured artist

Untitled topic
Boo. Delete. The only popular use of tortured artist I can think of is The_Ever_Popular_Tortured_Artist_Effect. MichaelExe (talk) 23:41, 21 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Sources are a mildly distracting luxury. People read Wikipedia to be informed, not bored. --194.81.33.10 (talk) 23:06, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

This article should be deleted; there is no point to it. The article is nothing more than a bunch of 'common sense' guesses ie. Tortured artists are more prone to self mutilation. Tripe. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.143.107.142 (talk) 20:42, 4 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Exactly. Common sense. Duh! You want tripe, I suggest you read WP:NOR. --194.81.33.10 (talk) 19:21, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

I edited this page heavily in high school when I wanted my school crush to take me seriously. Most of the stuff on this page is my doing (not counting the examples, which have increased ten-fold since I last edited this page) Now she has two kids, and her boyfriend's in jail. I now have a deep yearning desire to go back in time and tell my former self to stop being such a nitwit. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.138.131.16 (talk) 07:29, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Popular examples
I've removed this list multiple times now for two reasons: -- Fyrefly (talk) 23:09, 26 October 2012 (UTC) The list is completely unsourced and worthless. It's gone. If anyone would like to include a list of examples, you'll need to either provide reliable sources or establish a consensus demonstrating that this article should be exempt from verifiability, one of our core policies. - Sum mer PhD  (talk) 04:09, 18 June 2014 (UTC)
 * 1) The list is completely arbitrary, based solely on opinion since only one artist's article actually links to this page and that artist doesn't even appear in the list
 * 2) The list is already longer than the prose and could grow as large as editors feel like making it.

Faults in the artist, or in the world that doesn't understand him
Why is it that the tortured artist meme is assumed to reflect faults of the artist rather than faults of the world? I think there's an argument for the tortured artist trope resulting not from faults of the artist ("mental illness"), but rather from the mental illness of the world, apparent only to those whose creative thinking allows them to transcend the common indoctrination. We know that people are like sheep. This has been known for thousands of years (see The Bible). We know that people make all sorts of assumptions about what is true based on authority and social influence, and that such fallacies are less common in intelligent people (if intelligence has any meaning at all). We know that people with more insight tend to feel more troubled about their understanding of the world than people who know less (see Dunning-Kruger effect). So, this article could be expanded along these lines, even with plenty of references to recognized topics on Wikipedia, but as others here have said, Wikipedia is not our personal blog for expanding on philosophical ideas, although I sometimes think that would be a useful function when the ideas are self-evident. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:480:91:FF00:0:0:0:16 (talk) 14:23, 24 July 2020 (UTC)