A Hunger Artist is a short story by Franz Kafka. In this story we are introduced to an artist whose art is starvation. He starves for many days in the row and is famous because of that. There are many debates that go on whether or not he is a cheater and people spend days in days out sitting wand watching him. His record is 40 days but he wants more. With time public looses interest in him and he suffers from that. He fires his manager signs himself up for circus. That makes his career go down the drain. He dies and is replaced by a panther. People seem to have more interest in a panther than the artist. This leads me to this thought…… is it possible that we as humans are always looking for something new to get our attention? We get tired of things/performances quite too soon and often. We are constantly striving for new entertainment. This artist did something that is very rare and impossible for anyone to do. But people lost interest in him. Once he was replaced by a cat his cage was visited again. New entertainer brought new crowds.
I also think that just as the crowd can never be satisfied the performer himself is not satisfied. He has attention but starves for more. The only difference is that the audience has nothing to loose and moves on to a performer. But for a performer to achieve glory, and regain his audience is a no easy task and nearly impossible.
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5 comments:
I agree with you. It's hard to maintain fame. Look at all the Hollywood girls, they all seem to come and go. The artist wasn't happy with himself even though he was starving in order to be famous. People still lost interest in him. I think it's even harder to maintain fame in today's world where there are so many different options for people to watch, like tv, movies and dvds.
Yea, good point. Maybe it's a story about the insatiable goals we set for ourselves, as well as insatiable needs we place upon others.
i think that's true. it's hard to stay famous, especially with the times changing. i just don't understand that type of art. it's not like it's something of beauty or something that one would want to look at.
Good points about the artist never being satisifed, and the artist-audience realtionship.
You're all getting into an interesting discussion, here...great insights.
Alumah--yes, that's in intriguing point, right? It almost doesn't matter what the art is--if it's the artist's honest vision...this also brings up issues about our assumptions about are, beauty, etc.
Consider also the title, and some of the questions circling around art, the artist, the relationship between the two, the value of art, its purpose, the relationship between art, artist, the artist and the person(personal) man/woman, and the commercial (exploitative) world of art “business,” etc.
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