The Flawed Humanity of Our Favorite Artists: Why Idolizing the Perfect Version of Them Hurts Us More

We all have that one artist who feels like a friend in our head. They sing our pain, dance through our joy, and speak to our deepest hopes and dreams. We build them up in our minds as larger-than-life figures, imagining that they are somehow immune to the everyday flaws that make us human. But the truth is, our favorite artists are just as imperfect as we are, and sometimes, they are downright messy. Some are delightful people, while others have been, to put it plainly, monsters.

Refusing to acknowledge their flaws, or worse, sanitizing their legacies to fit our idealized versions of them, does more harm than good. Not just to their memory, but to ourselves. When we cling to this sanitized, flawless version of them, we’re doing so to hold onto our own fantasies of who they are. But those fantasies shatter when confronted with the complicated, multilayered reality of who they really were in life.

I know this firsthand because my favorite artist was a complicated man. Charming at times, yes, but also difficult, even cruel. People who worked with him, loved him, and tried to understand him still struggle to make sense of their experiences with him, even after he’s gone. I’ve learned things about him through many converations with those people that I wish I hadn’t, and for a while, it was hard to reconcile the person I imagined him to be with the person I now know he was.

But here's the thing: that process of reconciliation is necessary. I think back to something I wrote about him when he first passed: he was "perfectly imperfect and imperfectly perfect." That's who he was, and, honestly, that's who we all are. Monsters exist in our orbit, no doubt, but most of us are just flawed people striving for an illusion of perfection in an imperfect world. So are our favorite artists.

This isn’t about excusing unforgivable behavior. Some people are unredeemable, and they should be held accountable. But for the rest—those who were messy, sometimes cruel, sometimes kind—they deserve our forgiveness, just as we hope for forgiveness when we’re at our worst. The danger in refusing to see them as human is that it sets us up to fail, too. If we can’t accept their flaws, how can we accept our own?

Our favorite artists are mirrors. They reflect the best of us, but they also reflect the parts of us we don’t want to see. And that's okay. In learning to accept their flaws, we learn to accept our own humanity, and that makes room for a more authentic kind of love—for them and for ourselves.