"I miss Michael's intelligence and integrity. Michael had a deep respect for his art, it's origins and all other artists. That is why his music touched EVERYONE's heart and emotions...his art was inspired by ALL that came before him and all those around him."

Karen Faye, MJ´s make up artist and friend, via Twitter

“You give of your talents, of your ability. The talent that was given you by the Heavens. That’s why we’re here, to bring a sense of escapism in a time of need. If you’re a painter, you paint. If you’re a sculptor, you sculpt. If you’re a writer, you write. If you’re a songwriter, you write songs. If you’re a dancer, you dance. You give people some love and some bliss and some escapism and show them that you truly care from the heart. And, that you are there for them. YOU ARE THERE FOR THEM. And, that’s what I did.  It’s an important thing.”
Michael Jackson, October 2001

“I have always felt compassion for the planet. Sometime I just start to get emotional. I cry because I can almost feel the pain in the air. I put it in words and in song and in dance I think that is what artistry is.”

Michael Jackson

“To me, Michael Jackson embodies passion, energy, mystery, compassion, complexity, brilliance, creativity, wonder, tragedy and love.  His art wasn’t meant to only entertain (though that was part of it).  He aimed broader and deeper than most artists. His artistic legacy to me has to do with how he tried to use his art to re-imagine the world…and, how he fused and stretched and reinvented so many forms to that end.”

Joseph Vogel in The Journal of Michael Jackson Academic Studies

"We were all bunched together on the opposite side of the pool table from the art director. Michael was in the center. I stood next to him on his left. And the brothers were crowded around us on either side. The CBS art director slid the first of the portfolios toward Michael. He opened the first page, slowly … just enough to see perhaps an inch of the image. As he took in the artwork his knees began to buckle, his elbows bent, and all he could say was “oooohhhhh.” A soft, orgasmic “ooooh.” In that one syllable and in his body language, you could feel what he was seeing.

Do you know the poem by William Blake –
To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour  . . .
 

The intense ambition of that poem, the intense desire for wonder, was alive in Michael. More alive than anything of the sort I’d ever seen.  Michael saw the infinite in an inch.  As Michael opened the page further, inch by inch, his knees and elbows bent even more and his ”ooohs,” his sounds of aesthetic orgasm, grew even more intense.  Standing elbow to elbow and shoulder to shoulder with him, you could feel him discovering things in the brush and inkstrokes that even the artist never saw. By the time he’d opened the full page his body and voice expressed an ecstasy. An aesthetic epiphany.  I’d never encountered anything like it.  Michael felt the beauty of the page with every cell of his being. I’ve worked with Prince, Bob Marley, Peter Gabriel, Billy Joel, and Bette Midler, some of the most talented people of our generation, and not one of them had the quality of wonder that came alive in Michael. He saw the wonder in everything. His quality of wonder was beyond anything most of us humans can conceive...."

Howard Bloom, bestselling author

“The more I’ve studied Michael Jackson and his work, the more convinced I am that he was a man of tremendous courage and deep psychological insight, fiercely committed to social change, wryly funny even during the most difficult times, and an artist to the very core of his being.  He was everything in terms of art, and the transformative power of art.  We have no unmediated access to the world, we can only access the world through our senses and perceptions, and art has the ability to challenge and change those perceptions.  That is a tremendous power and Michael Jackson understood that better than any other artist of his time.  He developed an artistic response that challenges our most fundamental beliefs about race and identity, and has changed us and our culture in ways we have not yet begun to measure.  He developed an artistic response that shakes the foundations of perception itself, and challenges some of our basic assumptions about how we see, interpret, and make sense of the world. That is the work of a powerful artist.

M. Poetica

Privacy (Michael Jackson and J.D. Salinger)
By Constance Pierce

Michael Joseph Jackson was a ritual healer whose charismatic presence magnetized and unified millions of souls for good through his global performances.  Yet he also was, and still is, an intensely polarizing presence.  An immense amount of shadow material was projected upon him by a myopic culture. As an artist, he became skilled at bearing this shadow, aesthetically processing it, and thrusting it back to us (as maligned artists often do) as art.

Another enigmatic genius of twentieth century culture also left the stage in 2009.  He was 91, and unlike Michael, died of natural causes.  He had escaped his own meteoric rise to fame nearly a half century ago, seeking out a small enclave of anonymity where he fiercely protected his privacy against all odds.  When approached about doing his autobiography, J. D. Salinger reportedly responded by saying he had borne all of the exploitation and loss of privacy he could possibly bear in one lifetime.  Michael had expressed similar sentiments in the prescient lyrics of “Privacy” on his final album ironically titled “Invincible.”

Like Salinger, Michael seemed to make his own bid to abandon his fame during the last decade.  In the end, though, that seductive spotlight switched on one more time and he heroically (meant with mythic import) leapt into that light … and to his own death.

I wish that he had sought, as Salinger did, a place of stubborn anonymity so that he might have enjoyed several decades of personal and artistic privacy.  I can so easily conjure an image of Michael finally at ease in his majestic personal library, the way it was evocatively photographed for the pages of “Architectural Digest.”

During his lifetime, he collected more then twenty thousand books for this library, with a leaning toward art, literature and history.  Some of his greatest inspirations were the poetry of Emerson and Wordsworth, and the sculpture of Michelangelo.  As mentioned by so many already, Michael was a voracious reader.  One of his very last secret late night outings was to an L.A. bookstore.

I also imagine him spending a good part of his future engaging in the production of his classical compositions.  At the time of his death he was collaborating with renowned American conductor David Frank to arrange and produce these orchestral pieces with a major symphony in London in 2010.  Although, surprising to some, Michael listened to classical music all of his life, and had often expressed that his favorite composers of all time were Tchaikovsky, Debussy and Copeland.

As a painter and sketchbook artist himself, and an avid collector of art, there were reports that Michael – after retiring from the stage – was planning to realize a life long dream.  Months before his death, as the story goes, his daughter was encouraging him to commence serious study in art history through the educational wing of one of the renowned New York fine art institutes.

There were also several reports that we would see Michael involved in film directing, producing, and acting in future years.  He had already been engaged in a film project depicting the last days of one of his favorite writers, Edgar Allen Poe, where he had planned to play the lead role himself.  There were so many avenues of his rich creative life that remained ahead of him.

Above all though, I envision him growing older while relishing the richness of thousands of days with his three children who were everything to him.

However, Michael desired to offer a last serious retrospective of his finest work through a series of live concerts in London prophetically entitled “This Is It.”  His decision to engage in such an ambitious project at the age of fifty was, in large part, for his children.  They were born in recent years, and had never seen him perform live before.  In the end he had said “It’s all for love…” He died, at the careless hands of another, amidst his final act of creation.

According to New York Times writer Charles McGrath, J.D. Salinger once told his publisher he was “good and sick” of seeing his photograph on the dust jacket of “Catcher in the Rye” and he demanded that it be removed.   He reportedly ordered his agent to burn his fan mail.  Maybe, Salinger was furiously attempting to exorcise the “phonies” (in the vernacular of his archetypal character, Holden Caulfield) from his life.  Maybe, for the profoundly celebrated, the price of true privacy demands such acts of self-defense against brutal public invasion.

The other night I had a dream.  In it I could see J.D. Salinger and Michael Jackson sitting together. It looked to me like they had been up all night; sometimes companioning each other’s long silences, and at other times quietly discussing life … and death … and fatherhood … and art … and also the hauntingly elusive longing they had both shared for privacy.

In my dream, I notice that they are not conversing over a late night latte at a celestial Starbucks.  Instead, I clearly discern them to be sitting shoulder-to- shoulder, just like the “Nighthawks,” in that nearly empty iconic Edward Hopper diner.   Finally, they had each taken leave of the exquisite anguish of their fame.   Outside the diner, surrounding them, I now see the vastness of a clear dark night sky in Paradise.  The stars have come out.  And, as Dante once wrote after taking leave of the Inferno, “Let poetry rise, again.”

Constance Pierce is a visual artist especially interested in the import of Jackson’s global influence in the area of visual culture.  She has exhibited regionally, nationally, and in Europe and Japan. She is Associate Professor of Fine Art at St. Bonaventure University (NY). Her notable works include, ‘The Dance: Epiphany and Loss (Watercolor Series)’, ‘Will You Be There (Drawing Series)‘ and ‘RUACH HAKODESH: The Epiphanic and Cosmic Nature of Imagination in the Art of Michael Jackson‘. Find out more about Constance here.

Source of the article: michaeljacksonstudies.org/constance-pierce-privacy/

“Michael’s approach is very dramatic! Very concise. When he commits to an idea he goes all the way with it. He has the presence of mind to feel something, conceive it and then bring it to life. It’s a long way from idea to execution. Everybody wants to go to heaven and nobody wants to die.  It’s ass power, man. You have to be emotionally ready to put as much energy into it as it takes to make it right.” 

Quincy Jones

Steven Paul Whitsitt, a photographer, in The MJCast 118: Steven Paul Whitsitt Special (www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XfhBcc9MlU&t=5412s)

"No single artist - indeed, no movement or force - has eclipsed what Michael Jackson accomplished in the first years of his solo adult career. Jackson changed the balance of the pop world in a way that nobody has since. He forced Rock & Roll and the mainstream press to acknowledge that the biggest pop star in the world could be young and black, and in doing that he broke down more barriers than anybody."
Rolling Stone