I follow a relatively succinct set of rules for daily life.

It’s a slight variation on the velvet swaggerer Oscar Wilde’s advice, “Try anything in life once, except incest and folk dancing,” since no-one likes webbed hands, especially when you have to hold them and engage in box-step.

However, I’d like to further this statement by including a couple of guidelines that I have personally found handy for 21st-century living. They are as follows: steer far away from violence, racism, theft (especially after the almond croissant incident) and anyone involved in these activities.

Call me naive, but I would have thought this a foolhardy template to follow, especially when your daily pursuits are played out in the public eye. Apparently not.

Let me set the scene for you. You’re in Paris, you go out for an innocent tot of red wine with your beloved to some authentic bistro with chequered table cloths and those bottles covered in wax.

All of a sudden, the (now former) head designer of Dior, John Galliano, all red-wine-lipped and obnoxious, leans in your general direction, commits several reproachable lines of verbal diarrhoea and culminates this awkward display with the slightly inappropriate line, “I Love Hitler”. Luckily your mobile phone is videoing the silly man – clever you.

I wager that you may been tipsy before; perhaps even so merry that you’ve slept in your dog’s basket – in this, we are united. Yet instead of morphing into an abusive anti-Semite, I tend to stick to acquiring some sort of alcohol rash and putting Rihanna on repeat. It’s so much nicer for everyone.

Galliano’s awkward torrent is yet another example of a long succession of people in the public eye acting like complete arses and essentially disgracing themselves. The list is long and includes the likes of Charlie Sheen, Winona and even the Hoff.

However, the bad behaviour of these famous folk has me thinking about artistic license. If Galliano was an unknown who worked behind the scenes, would the House of Dior have been so adamant about dismissing him?

Essentially Galliano is an artist – a massive racist artist, yes. Yet throughout time, some of the most esteemed artistic figures have been known as outlandish, dare I say it, morons.

Fin de siècle artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was renowned for his sordid soirees in Parisian brothels, looking up the skirts of can-canning ladies and generally being quite a naughty little man.

The same can be said for livid 17th-century Italian artist Caravaggio, who had a notoriously bad temper and even killed a man. Even contemporary artist Tracy Emin is famously quoted as saying, “I always want to behave badly.”

Of course, I’m far from suggesting that all artists are potential murderers; just look at Tony Hart – he was a lovely man. It’s just that sometimes all the creative energy that delights us on the canvas/stage/screen can sometimes spill into daily life.

By no means am I condoning bad behaviour, but perhaps we’ve become accustomed to the fact that the creation of art is the only pursuit in which excessive and irrational behaviour is deemed acceptable or even expected. (Just not when you rely on selling pretty things to people, à la Dior.)

If this is the case, if you were to douse Mel Gibson’s throat with several bottles of absinthe and thrust a paintbrush in his hand, I wonder what kind of masterpiece he’d create.

More Nicola

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