Out of respect for Lou Reed, I tried to hold out on reading anything written about him until he was well and truly dead.
Last week, I finally picked up Mick Wall's summation of Lou's life, a book published almost immediately after his death.
Unfortunately, Wall confirmed my suspicions that creative industry hacks are consistently chomping at the bit to be the first to mythologise, even at the expense of someone's mortal dignity.
As a literature student, I have a fairly overwhelming aversion to ever presuming I know what an author or artist might have intended.
To my mind, intent is speculation, and speculation can derail effective criticism.
And of course no critic can reasonably claim to have a truly intimate understanding of an artist's intent.
The world of popular art criticism, however, seems to relish in guessing at what someone hoped to achieve and then presenting their guesswork as absolute fact.
It seems that no-one can write about art without making it their own.
And, in particular, it seems no-one can write about art without weaving it into their movement and scene specific narrative.
Lou Reed was a figure with one foot in the art world and one foot in the music world, and in the aftermath of his life and career the music world has snaffled him up.
Perhaps this is because music is in some ways more vulnerable than art.
When we experience and consume music we are not only presented with a body of work, but also a unique face, voice, and personality.
Obviously, these facets of musical production are not exempt from interpretation and criticism, and they can and should be interpreted in a multitude of different ways; both artistic production and criticism should come from a multiplicity of voices.
But what I take issue with is artists being spun into trends that are based upon a presumption of intent; intent that may or may not be present.
When we examine art we do tend to gravitate towards a universal interpretation. We want things to fit into a linear and conceptual whole because narrative is how we understand and organise our lives.
As not everything can fit beneath one umbrella, though, we break things up into smaller wholes and this is how creative scenes and movements are born.
But scenes and movements rely upon the assumption that artists are moving towards one shared goal, and moving towards a goal is based upon intent.
And as we can't understand intent from an external perspective, the mythologising of artists undermines their autonomy over their personality and their creative output.
The Lou Reed image has been appropriated by voices with little to no intimate connection with him and he has subsequently become a figurehead for a so-called scene that no doubt would have been fragmented and ultimately disorganised in its time.
Now, the art industry has such a high turnover that the mythologising begins before the artist has retired, let alone died.
Even Dunedin's musical microcosm is a thriving hub of ''you think you're a punk but you're actually folk'' criticism and commentary.
We've suffered the ''Dunedin Sound'' but it hasn't stopped there.
Now ''twee'' is being shoved violently down the throat of anyone who so much as looks at a guitar while wearing a cardigan.
I suppose what upsets me so much is that in reality, trend politics do control the creative industry.
But, they perpetuate a stifling and aesthetically toxic community that does nothing to foster originality or creativity.
Art is clearly driven by the industry behind it, but ideally it shouldn't be dominated by whatever industry voice can shout the loudest about who someone really is or what they really mean.
Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
