Artists may produce deliberately alienating work as a defense against overwhelming fan attention

Evidence

Initially defending Self Portrait as something that the Everly Brothers or Elvis might have done, Dylan eventually characterized the LP as an act of aggression against his fans, despite its having been conceived and largely recorded before his return to New York City: “There’d be crowds outside my house,” he told Rolling Stone some years later. “And I said, ‘Well, fuck it. I wish these people would just forget about me. I wanna do something they can’t possibly like.’” The double album was part of the joke—“If you’re gonna put a lot of crap on it, you might as well load it up!” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1585

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: artists who sabotage their own fame as a strategy for reclaiming private life — Dylan’s Self Portrait as deliberate career arson rather than creative failure.