I just saw, um, something. An artistic work. This work trafficked pretty much entirely in cliched, secondhand material. It was, to put it simply, junky and undistinguished. I’m not trying to write a review here; this is just what you need to know before I can say what I want to say. (For what it’s worth, I consider the comments above to be fairly objective facts about the thing – they don’t really touch on my opinion.)
Anyway, this particular work, for all its shortcomings, did not particularly annoy or displease me. In fact I generally considered it successful, and in articulating the reason why, I feel like I hit upon a possible litmus test for all art. The piece pleased me because I believe that it would have pleased its own creators. That is to say, it was made of stuff that I would consider “corny,” but made by people who (it seemed to me) sincerely loved that corn. Had the creators wandered in like I had, I believe they would have found their work absolutely delightful. And I don’t think this is true of all works – in fact, I don’t think it’s true of a great many works. And I think the distinction gets at something crucial. I think one subconsciously tries to have the experience that the creators would have had.
So much television seems bad not precisely because it is stupid, but rather because it is stupid but not infused with any sincere love of stupidity. TV shows almost always give me the impression of having been put together by people who, if they were in the audience, would be annoyed or disinterested. This thing I saw tonight, though objectively annoying and forgettable, would, I believe, have pleased its creators, and this makes me sympathetic – to the artists and to their work. Enthusiasm is sympathetic. The opposite is not. Is cynicism the opposite? Maybe, in this situation anyway.
I worry sometimes that if I encountered my own music (or my own writing) I wouldn’t like it. But, and I am trying to be fair with myself, I don’t think that’s what would happen. I think that if I encountered something by me, I would feel threatened by it because I would identify with it, and would try to find flaws with it – and would easily find some – but I think that the sincerity of it would come through and I would ultimately be heartened by the fact that someone else out there had a similar sensibility to me. Namely, me.
I still think sometimes about the question I posed at the end of my posting about Everything Is Illuminated in re: what is it about bad art/writing/whatever that makes us feel “manipulated” rather than “moved” or “entertained.” Maybe this is a partial answer. I didn’t get the impression that Jonathan Safran Foer would have been particularly moved by his own book. I think he just would have felt like someone was stealing his material.
I definitely don’t think George Lucas would like the new Star Wars movies if he hadn’t made them.
I’m tired so this is over.
I’m just guessing at what you’re talking about, but I’m fairly positive I know.
And I’m fairly sure that when I saw an ealier rendition of this piece of work, I felt very similar.
(did that make any sense?)
If you’re going to keep a blog that expounds on every cultural object you ingest, it doesn’t seem quite fair or in keeping with the spirit of this project to be cryptic about the object in question and to only give us your later impressions.
It’s a fair point, I guess, though I hope you haven’t taken my little goal of talking about everything I ingest as a promise. It was more just a typical case of me needlessly turning a passing whim into a hopeless completist compulsion. Though I am ostensibly writing this stuff for you, the people who read my site, the goal of writing about everything I see is pretty much just something for me personally to strive for and fail at – I mean, do you really care whether I write about everything I see? Who really cares what I see? Maybe you do and now I’m letting you down.
Well, anyway, I’ve pretty much abandoned all hope of living up to that goal. It takes me time and effort to make my thoughts coalesce and then write them down – which is I guess is part of what seems healthy about doing this site, to me – and when I frequently don’t have time to be doing this thing every day, plus I already have a long backlog of stuff to write about, I find myself avoiding movies and such because I can’t afford to be even further behind. And that’s just ridiculous.
I was going to post a list of the things from months ago that were on my backlog but which I was probably going to just scrap in favor of writing about selective things as I encounter them (rather than four months later). If you want to talk about, or want me to talk about, any of the stuff on this list, I will be happy to.
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Steve Martin, The Pleasure of My Company (audiobook)
Benjamin Kunkel, Indecision
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, dir. Tim Burton
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep
Mutual Attraction, dir. Andrew Bujalski
Roy Fuller, Owls and Artificers: Oxford Lectures on Poetry
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
I still hold out hope of writing about some of those, but I release myself from the obligation. It’s optional. There might be some more that I’m forgetting but right now I have to run.
As for the reticence of the entry above, the thing that I saw was a local and possibly sensitive thing, from which I wanted only to depart (in an implicitly insulting direction) toward this other thought, so I figured I just wouldn’t go into it. Perhaps I should have just lied and said it was a painting at the local coffee shop. Why don’t you take it to be that.