In Which Someone Expounds

Hastings, MN--At least I think we're still in Hastings. We basically are. At the very least we're in a very small sub-suburb of Hastings. We're camping for the first night in a few and I keep thinking about the Battle of Hastings. 1066. Poor Harold. I realized just now that when I read my post from last night earlier today I was kind of unhappy with its brevity, a concern I had also expressed in the post itself (in fact, said concern might have had a not-insignificant effect on my perception of the post's quality), and I'd like to write more about it now. Basically I can feel a weird tension between three groups: artists, popular artists (you know that I don't mean that members of the first group can't be popular), and non-artists. Being 23 and not particularly perceptive of shifts in cultural tectonic plates, and painfully aware of the bias about current events always seeming more significant than they end up being in history's eyes, I'm not sure how long this particular kind of tension (I'll explain in a minute) has existed or how it is currently changing, but my hunch is actually that it seems to be calming, and I also tend to attribute this result to precisely the kind of arts funding that has developed in the past, say, 20-30 years. Freeing artists from creating commercial art has spurred innovation not only among those artists who are free from such requirements, but even among those who do make commercial art because of the increasing artistic awareness and critical skills among non-artists (Ed.: this is precisely the kind of over-generalized, underthought nonsense that spews from the mouths of academicians and Republicans, as from God and Lucifer).

General Problem (General Problem): What is the economic role of the artist in society? An artist must necessarily be supported in his basic human needs by providers of those needs: farmers, carpenters, plumbers, &c., and obviously those providers benefit from the artist's work. But what if the farmers and carpenters and plumbers and the cetera were to become artists as well? This is the dilemma of the Professional, Full-Time Artist, who simultaneously recognizes the artistic urge in those for whose pleasure and fulfillment (there are cetera there but that issue is beyond the scope of this post) he creates his work and the talent for creating such works that he possesses (the talent, not the works) and that his audience does not. Until at least the 20th C and maybe not even until halfway through it, this wasn't a dilemma at all for European/American Professional Full-Time Artists--even when they weren't creating their art they were critiquing their fellow Professional Full-Time Artists' (Ed.: time for an acronym). But the broadening of general education (General Education) around the beginning of the 20th C created a more nebulous barrier between the artist and the general public (Ed.: you serious? The “general public” prefers Brahms to Schoenberg) and in doing so created opportunities for non-artists to create art that demanded critical attention (obviously that's a racially charged statement since most non-white artists find it difficult to attract critical attention as artists even today, just look at the way hip-hop is still treated by conservatives or even Midtowners--it's a fucking travesty, but that's a story for a different night, kids). Did Charles Ives sell insurance door-to-door when he wasn't reinventing American band music, or did he reinvent American band music when he wasn't selling insurance door-to-door (Ed.: oh, right, the nice rhetorical flourish eliminates all logical and historical problems with your argument. Good luck applying to grad school, asshole.)?

Another General Problem (Ed.: don't say it): Hypothesis #1: All humans react to art. Hypothesis #2: Art is not created in a vacuum; a common history or understanding of the world or at least some knowledge of the history of an artistic tradition is necessary in order to critique a work of art, because all art, and I know those of you who like to believe in “artistic revolutions” might find this difficult to swallow but although it might be a wonderful romantic notion they don't exist, is influenced by something, and to really understand the work it is pretty much necessary to be able to connect it to some other work of art in some artistic vocabulary. So. Hypothesis #3: If we combine Hypotheses 1-2, we see pretty clearly that people can get very frustrated by artwork they don't understand. I get frustrated with Indian paintings because I have next to no idea what's going on; lots of people find John Cage insufferable, even today; &c, because there are many different artistic traditions and contexts, and consequently artwork that some people make sense of in one context will be made sense of by other people through traditions that they understand. Senior year of college, I was complaining (Ed.: whining, ranting, sermonizing, don't use the least connotative word, say what you mean!) about the choice of Third Eye Blind to play Spring Fling, because Third Eye Blind sucks. Like, really sucks. Like, a powerful vacuum cleaner in a ceiling fan in a black hole sucks. (N.B. If there's one thing not to take away from this post, it's de gustibus non est disputandum; some art is better than other art, although it would reek of mediocritizing to flatter Third Eye Blind with the name “artist”.) And Mack said something like, “They're fine, even though there are no underlying mathematical progressions etc.” Because he thought I was complaining about their lack of pretensions to “serious artist” status. I wasn't, of course. They just suck on every level. But the point is that it can be difficult to understand other people's adoration for or objections to works of art if our education and experience don't extend in that direction. Which is a really obvious point but it needed to be said.