I'm going to go off on a tangent here, and I want to make it clear that I am not railing against karmakaze or suggesting they implied things they didn't say. It is just that in a more general sense I wish this notion of "suffering for art" would die, and this is just me venting my frustration with this meme (in the original sense of the word). Because I think it applies to the tech industry just as much.

Hannah Gadsby's put it into words better than I can in "Nanette", but sadly I can't link to a 1-hour Netflix special so my own angry take on this will have to do.

Yes, some art, specifically art about suffering, benefits from people who experienced suffering. Otto Dix is brilliant because he shows us the horrors of war he experienced[0][1]. And there is such a thing as posttraumatic growth[2], so sure, overcoming "suffering" can have benefits in general. Emphasis overcoming, though!

Other than that it's romantic nonsense that has been debunked by psychology time and time again. And it's dangerous nonsense too, because it leads to movies like Whiplash.

Don't get me wrong: it's a brilliant film, but because it's so dazzling I don't think people criticize the issues it has enough. Think about it: two of the most privileged white dudes in the world complain that Jazz is dying, and our main antagonist spends the entire film bullying, tormenting, sometimes flat-out gaslighting his students because he somehow believes that traumatizing them will make them as good as some of the worlds greatest musicians. Of course, he is being completely ignorant of the context that the latter lived in, of their personal histories. Suffering in itself does not inspire greatness, dammit.

Perhaps Whiplash's underlying thesis is that this is not true, nor justifyiable, but if so it's just like anti-war movies that end up glorifying war.

Because it ends with giving Terence Fletcher a moment to tell "his side" of the story. He shows no regret for bullying one of his students into suicide, "because a real Charlie Parker would have been able to take [my abuse]."

Holy freaking self-serving cherry picking survivor bias, Batman! First of all, we don't know if Charlie Parker would have been any less brilliant if he had had proper therapy for his inner demons. Perhaps he would have been more brilliant, ever considered that? Young John Coltrane suffered from heroine and alcohol addictions, but he wrote "A Love Supreme" after he had a religious experience and overcame those addictions. Not to mention the fact that we are ignoring countless of brilliant artist who are not suffering, which you don't hear about because it's not a juicy story.

So at the end of the movie the main characters are just as horrible, misguided and unaware of their own institutional whiteness and privileges as before, and haven't really learned anything. Then they give a dazzling performance that seems to suggest to us that yes, all of this was justified to give us this. It's ignorant, insulting and wrong.

Believing that suffering for art is necessary is a misguided, romantic and outdated and dangerous view of genius and I can't wait for it to die. No matter what field we are talking about.

[0] https://www.ottodix.org

[1] The appreciation of "ugly" art is actually a very interesting topic, I recommend Talk about a Painting: A Cognitive Developmental Analysis as a nice starting point.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posttraumatic_growth