tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post3045023452477702502..comments2023-09-10T03:36:20.873-04:00Comments on The New York Minute: Art & The Price of SuccessJim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-85497436615439783132007-03-24T17:17:00.000-04:002007-03-24T17:17:00.000-04:00Thanks for stopping by and commenting, John. First...Thanks for stopping by and commenting, John. <BR/><BR/>First, I agree that it's a fine line between looking for a sympathetic reception and pandering. Having fumbled with the idea of audience (or readership) a few posts ago, I'll admit I feel the conflict: I'm suspicious of the claim that artists follow a muse so separate from society that it's unchangeable, independent from considerations of posterity or reception - but then, the Artist as concieved by turn-of-the-century modernism is precisely that. And audience, patronage, art v. craft, separation - all of this gets too hairy for the small space of a comment box, especially when I remember the Renaissance and have to square masterpieces with the venal and horrifically corrupt audiences of one who commissioned them. <BR/><BR/>Second: there's a distinction I might have made but didn't, mostly so I could shoehorn that Hazlitt quotation in - it's the pithiest encapsulation of disdain for popularity I've come across.<BR/><BR/>Writing and music, at least if it's ever to be performed live, are fundamentally different in the the way they audiences interact. A writer can pull a Pynchon and be invisible to the public eye while continuing to put out work; he becomes a celebrity, and you have the Hemingway effect - trying to reconcile a performative identity that's always on 'stage' (a kind of art of its own) with the work. <BR/><BR/>But live musicians, particularly rock musicians, are living the Hemingway effect all the time; it's the rare person working in popular music who can afford not to do live shows. With music, there's a literal stage in a way that there's not with writing, and the genre cultivates performative identity as much as it does performing the music itself - more, maybe, since the advent of the music video.<BR/><BR/>Maybe that's why in another A.V. Club Crosstalk, the assertion that musicians burn out young can be so ironclad (prominant exceptions aside) - it rubbed me the wrong way as somebody who was always taught you needed to be writing for ten years or so before you started to produce acceptable work (still working through that apprenticeship!). But maybe that's the nature of the mediums - the pressures for an inherently performative (and sexy! young people <I>love</I> music!) art are different than the sedate world of print, Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, and authors who give good readings aside. <BR/><BR/>There's a long, long paper waiting to be written (already written?) about alcohol and drugs as coping mechanisms in the face of a split identity (always on stage, never 'truly' yourself) caused by Fame across the board, whether you're Charlie Parker or Jackson Pollack or Raymond Carver.<BR/><BR/>Anyway.Jim Slighhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-68837095193506277812007-03-24T16:28:00.000-04:002007-03-24T16:28:00.000-04:00Entertainers are held to the stage by the press of...<I>Entertainers are held to the stage by the press of the crowd.</I><BR/><BR/>This reminds me--by way of how to avoid being pressed by the crowd--of something I read in an interview with Joe Ely this past week. He's 60 now, and the interviewer asked him, basically, why he keeps on keeping on. His response: "I have absolutely no reason at all for doing this." Of course, one could say that that's because Ely does not have nearly the audience now that he had during his heyday of the early '80s, but the more accurate response, to his mind, would be that he's following his muse rather than producing product--hence his starting his own record label because he wants to produce more material than, apparently, any record company thinks will sell. Now: whether the music Ely produces now will be as good as or better than his work on <I>Musta Notta Gotta Lotta</I> because he is following his muse instead of placating a record label or the masses is an open question. The maintaining of artistic integrity does not inevitably lead to the production of good art. One follows one's muse with the tools that one is given/cultivates.<BR/><BR/>By definition, artists create. It is (or should be) the act of creating that matters to the artist. Of course, artists hope their creations will find a sympathetic audience--even better would be one large enough to part with its money that it could help pay the bills. But if they focus too much on that hope, that way pandering (potentially) lies--something other than creating.John B.https://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com