Aunt Toby with the racing schedule, and aunt Teddy behind her looking so-fist-i-cated.
Completely unrelated, I've been watching "The Power of Myth," the PBS series with Joseph Campbell from 1988 or thereabouts. It's about the history of mythology, and spirituality, and the line between the knowable and the unknowable. Campbell says that artists are the mythmakers, and of course as a lifelong student of mythology, he asserts that mythologies are our roadmaps, without which we are utterly lost. This is a nice counterpart to the moment I had on Friday, looking around my shared studio at college at what I was up to and what everybody else was up to, thinking 'what the hell are we doing here, thinking this work is so important?' Just making objects and pictures and feeling so serious and important about all of it, working so hard to make utterly useless things . . . I like Campbell's take, with all its historical ramifications -- this romantic notion that we have some sort of gift, we are called to the highest post, and that artists are, maybe, making the only things that actually are useful.
Which brings me to the last point, vaguely connected. I went to a concert on Saturday night that a friend invited me to. It was this singer/songwriter called Joseph Arthur, and it absolutely made my lips curl. I've been trying to understand what it is about this particular music, and music like it, that makes me feel so uncomfortable and displeased that I want to crawl out of my skin. I hate to be one of those people who harps endlessly about 'selling out' and 'keeping it real,' but when I boil it right down, that's where I end up. This guy -- he's got the hipster mullet, he's got this super attractive backing band of incredibly competent session musicians, he's got a voice that alternates between gravelly fullness and coked-out falsetto, he never misses a note, the band never misses a beat, the songs all progress in a predictable, familiar way. Have I, have I heard this before? It's so familiar, so comfortable . . . This bothers me because it doesn't feel like art, it feels like profit. It's like when a movie has been test-screened, and you can FEEL that it's been test-screened, that 1,000 imbecile's opinions have been taken into account in creating the final piece -- it is entertainment appealing to the lowest common denominator, with no heart or soul or purity of vision or intention, no honesty and no sincerity. But the thing is -- if I were going to a, say, Britney Spears concert (you know, if we lived in an alternate universe or something) I would have no doubt of the intentions of the artist and promoters, and would have no doubt that the majority of the audience was also aware of these un-artistic motivations. Nobody is being fooled, in part because nobody is trying to fool -- nobody is pretending it's anything other than what it is. The thing that got under my skin about this particular show, this Joseph Arthur, was that it was being packaged as something honest and pure, something with totally artistic intentions. It felt like a sort of malicious dishonesty . . . Now, I might be being totally unfair -- it could just be a lack of vision or a problem of fame causing one to lose perspective. I know nothing about this guy's back catalog. I just know that the show I saw made me feel a little bit like Mr. Arthur was telling me he loved me just to get me into bed.
5 comments:
Truth is discovered. Meaning is partly constructed. Joey Campbell was among the first in the recent trend to get the two mixed up. He sought to discover meaning and, finding he could not, concluded that this obviated truth. I'm not looking to lay the sole burden of postmodern anxiety on him as he clearly fit into a movement, but he fit into a movement. The aftermath of essentialism et alia in academia and Western civilization as a whole is still being felt, and it feels like clinical depression. It's poignant sunshine gilding a doomed Earth. It's existential angst pacified with assurances of one's inconsequentiality. It's plattitudes that everything's a creative act and arbitrary in the end. It's nihilism quietly howling behind our lives.
I mean, what IS the point of curing ebola if a good enough story can render it meaningful...right?
You can call it a straw man if you like, but I think "artists are, maybe, making the only things that actually are useful" implies it.
Left brains are useful, too.
If curing ebola is the benchmark of noble professions, where is the value in a well-crafted story?
The medical microbiologist still must go home and in his sleepless nights face the reality that even if he succeeds, people will continue to die, the world will continue to rot.
He has to find his meaning within that, or above that, or circling around that.
As do the artists, and the myth makers, and all the rest. So if I say painting a picture and curing ebola are both creative acts worthy of reverence, how is it that you say I have discounted the necessity of the latter, but not the former? Why can't they be equally important?
But more to the point, I think we can agree that the necessity of the latter is obvious. But that isn't the path I've chosen. Am I less noble? -- Do people become virologists because they are inherently more noble than me? No, they become virologists because their strengths and interests are different from mine.
This is a disjointed reply.
A nerve, but it's not the nerve I like.
I don't want to be a stand-in for whomever you're arguing with. I'll come back when you said what you said and I said what I said. For what it's worth, I'm sorry you feel ignoble, but we can't all cure ebola.
Seeing as you wrote the post two years ago, if you've subsequently changed your mind, why not do it openly? Consistency can tangle, like lying to cover lies.
I don't at all feel ignoble, but you're right, I did feel it 2 years ago. It seemed a bit of a bore to just respond, "That was two years back. I feel different now." I thought I'd try to play along.
I found Campbell in a moment of angst and self-doubt, and he told me that I was doing right. So I subscribed.
Apparently I missed your point. I'll let you clarify it for me, but there is probably a better forum for that than here.
But yes, of course, if I really thought making objects and painting pictures was enough for me, I wouldn't be where I am today.
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