Is Bob Dylan an artist?

Contemporary Review, June, 2004 by Michael Karwowski

T. S. Eliot and fellow poet Philip Larkin, for instance, have both had their sexual history, addictions and prejudices mercilessly exposed since their death, but the more their common humanity is pilloried, the greater their achievements appear by contrast. Look at Larkin. While he was working as a librarian, a worshipping secretary discovered a pile of soft porn magazines in his desk and asked him what they were. His reply revealed him as a true artist. 'They're to wank to, or with, or at. I'm not quite sure which is correct', he replied with idol-shattering truth. Similarly with Bob Dylan.

But more importantly, infinitely more importantly than slavish devotion masquerading as criticism, is the fact that Dylanologists rarely, if ever, deal with what Bob Dylan is actually writing about. Ricks, in fact, is concerned almost exclusively with the style of the songs and not their content. In the process, he rejects interpretation outright. 'Who, except an uncouth sleuth-hound, cares?' he asks, dismissively. Most of Bob Dylan's millions of fans care, as a matter of fact. That is precisely why they are Bob Dylan fans. The whole point of Bob Dylan's songs is not whether they can be compared with Keats and viewed as great poetry, but what they mean and what they can tell us about the human condition, about the nature of reality as it concerns Man, which is the very definition of art.

In this respect, Ricks and the legion of Dylanologists do not have a clue. The Professor points out, tongue in cheek, that 'Dylan has made it clear that he is not favourably disposed towards critics (for all his being a favourite to so many of them)' and nowhere is this more apparent than in the songwriter's Ballad of a Thin Man on Highway 61 Revisited:

                        You walk into the room
                        With your pencil in your hand
                        You see somebody naked
                        And you say: 'Who is that man?'
                        You try so hard
                        But you don't understand ...

                        You've been with the professors
                        And they've all liked your looks ...
                        You've been through all of
                        F. Scott Fitzgerald's books
                        You're very well read
                        It's well known

                        Because something is happening here
                        But you don't know what it is
                        Do you, Mister Jones?

Indeed, there is no escaping the truth that Ricks and company are decadent in the extreme, 'decadence' here being defined as 'the dropping of the object', missing the point of it all, ignoring the true art, which is having something profound to say about life itself and saying it convincingly. And this brings us back to Ricks's scheme in Dylan's Visions of Sin. There is no doubt that Bob Dylan has gone through periods of obsession with sin. Jewish by birth, he spent several years at the turn of the 1980s as a fundamentalist Christian, when he would self-righteously damn his audiences for their sinfulness and write songs such as What Can I Do For You? on 1980's Saved album, with instantly forgettable lines such as: