Creative disreputability

Peter Schjeldahl is his usual quotable self in "Different Strokes," his review of Martin Gayford's The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles:

"Creativity takes what it needs from the person who possesses it, or is possessed by it, and discards the rest."

"Imagine! A couple of disreputable men in a nowhere town slap paint on canvas and thereby change everything. It has been a long time now, half a century after Abstract Expressionism, since that scenario had its last echo in a real artistic or cultural development, except in tones of irony or elegy. No individual can any longer dandle the world at the end of a brush. The legend is correspondingly estranged and enhanced."