Art for my sake

Brilliant work of art or child's squiggles?

When the world cannot tell the difference, it no longer has any art.

When culture has no bounds, it is not culture.

How do I resolve how painful I feel the meaninglessness of our culture is with how sure I am that life is meaningless? I do not. The former is powered, I have no doubt, by a desire to be excellent, and a fear that if anything can arbitrarily be considered excellent, then it is not worth excelling. The latter is a notion similar to that that holds that we are nothing but machines, spinning out quantum-level reactions through our days. This may be true but it doesn't feel like that.

Ultimately, I feel that the lesson of Marla Olmstead is this. When some philistine or other tries to tell me that you measure the value of a writer by how many copies they sell (and by extension how much money they make), which they often do, I can say, yes, but this is real art because it sells and so there.

Is it not a dwindling? Does not making everything in our lives a question of money diminish our lives? (While I say this, I do know that Shakespeare did it for the dollar, and that Michelangelo whored to the highest bidder -- I'm not saying that art must not have recompense, only that the recompense cannot be allowed to distinguish it. Michelangelo is not feted because some Renaissance mucky-muck filled his purse with ducats.)

Watching Top of the Pops last night, as some interminable nonsense drifted across the screen, I couldn't help thinking "did no one involved in this ask themselves what the point of it was?" A lazy, ill-thought-out melody, a lyric that was nothing but a list of songwriting cliches (who else but a lyricist or a teen blogger would think that suggesting that "I need strength to get me through" was an insightful comment on the human condition?), a singer who seemed barely interested in conveying anything even resembling emotion, let alone joy or pain, the two emotions that tend to fuel great popular music.

*sigh* I know I am a modernist Canute and I should just go with the flow. But what would that leave me in my own life? I would be just another ordinary guy, living a life of quiet desperation in a dusty backwater and I don't want that, not ever, to be my fate.

posted by Dr Zen @ 11:07 am