Art & Entertainment
arts agenda
Art & Entertainment
By Maurice Greenia, Jr (aka Maugré)
Art and entertainment are both sick. In this modem Western society they exist, live and mutate within an unhealthy state. Something is very wrong and no one seems to want to talk about it or even acknowledge it.
Art is not allowed to play its proper part in this society. Instead of playing the role in the lives of people-at-large which it truly should be playing it's forced into other roles. There's plenty of good work, even great work being done--yet not many people get to see it, hear it, experience it. Much of the most important, truly cutting-edge artwork being made day goes by largely unnoticed. If current trends continue, many artists won't be "famous" until after they've died. Like Van Gogh (and many others), artists end up giving their best, year in and year out, yet end up being swept under the rug or even buried alive. Most art criticism fails to truly understand the art of its own time. It takes the future to stand back and get a clearer picture, to write revisionist criticism.
Yet, for some of us, the future already lives. We need one foot firmly in the future and one foot firmly in the past in order to effect a more authentic and complex present.
Van Gogh wasn't recognized largely because his work was experimental, passionate, and most people's eyes weren't quite ready for it yet. When artists are truly ahead of their time it usually doesn't help their lives any. If art did play its proper role in this world then the true innovators, prophets, visionaries etc. would be embraced instead of ignored.
Marcel Duchamp said "I don't believe in art. I believe in artists." One thing people don't realize is that art is made by flesh and blood human beings. They're as strong and as fragile as anyone. The more intensely and deeply involved in their art they are--the higher the price they often have to pay for daring to live lives of unfettered creativity. They need our support and our understanding.
To this it is tempting to say "Not in this world! You must be kidding."
Art has many enemies. One of these is entertainment. To entertain is to amuse, divert. In principle, there is nothing wrong with this. But when huge numbers of people find themselves consistently diverted from important business at hand it can be a problem.
One of the things which entertainment diverts people from is art. Entertainment becomes an "art substitute" which can be ingested instead of art. The best entertainment becomes art. Much of the worst art becomes entertainment. Entertainment has the muscle. Its monopoly on the center stage pushes art out of the picture.
The advertising budget for movies and pop music is huge. Meanwhile, true art struggles merely to get a word in edgewise.
Entertainment is in an exploitive relationship with art. There is a similar dynamic between the rich and the poor, between men and women, between the races etc, i.e. large portions of the stronger dominant side tend to consciously unconsciously both exploit and damage the "other." They often do this just because they can, just because it's easy to.
This is also the case between art and entertainment.
In her 1951 book "Divine Horsemen/Voodoo Gods of Haiti," Maya Deren wrote that "in a modem industrial culture, the artists constitute an 'ethnic group,' subject to the full 'native' treatment." She points out connections between how industrialists, tourists and anthropologists treat indigenous cultures and how true artists are treated everyday.
There is plenty of evidence to support the case that the "artist-native" is indeed a misunderstood and exploited group. And entertainment is a major source of its exploitation.
As always, groups have struggled for rights for women, children, workers, homosexuals, prisoners, African Americans, Native Americans and for the earth on which they live. These struggles have often overflowed into each other, inspired each other and formed alliances/interconnections.
Now's the time for artists to reclaim their rights, to struggle to try to reestablish art's true place in this society, the country, this world. If we are successful then perhaps the energy from our struggle can somehow inspire and interconnect with other social struggles.
What, precisely, would this entail? Art and entertainment will have to "have it out." An entertainment which is nourished and enriched by art (instead of merely trying to exploit it) would be a stronger and healthier entertainment. Having a truly quality "product" (film-song-t.v. show etc. etc.) would be better for entertainment, for art and for the audience. If more entertainment became art, if that which is not art would stop insulting and abusing art, then things could be better. An unhealthy relationship could be made healthy again.
Part of this would entail entertainment being willing to share the audience. Then it would be up to artists to create works which, while strong and personal, are also accessible. The public needs to be courted, to be opened up to art. If greater numbers of people became involved with art and with quality entertainment, they would find their lives enlarged and enriched.
The question of quality, itself, is paramount. In art and entertainment both we find that people have different tastes and preferences. Work that I love you may hate and vice versa.
Yet there are some things which large numbers of people should be able to agree upon. In entertainment and even in some art we find that "copyism" reigns supreme. This is the syndrome wherein something is copied so many times that it loses all focus and substance. A videotape, audiotape or photocopy which has been copied once or twice is still fairly legible. But in fifth, tenth, even twentieth generations, you'll find that the image breaks down completely. Eventually there isn't anything there at all. A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy finds itself distorted and reduced. Thus it is with much of modern culture. Yet it isn't even a matter of originality so much as being willing to drink at the original source. This includes having a deep and complex knowledge of the history and reality of art, culture, painting, dance, blues, jazz, sculpture, cinema, television etc. To breathe and be inspired by a fifth or sixth generation copy instead of going back to the original will never help anyone's work. But it takes more work to seek out one's true roots at times.
Also art, entertainment (and their critics-analysts) need not be afraid of magic, passion, intense emotions and vivid dreaming-imagining. Forces such as outsider art, surrealism, "psychiatric" art, naive art, "primitive" art etc. are some of the roads which lead into these mysteries. To deny these forces seems to be reactionary, miserabilist and counterproductive. To ignore these "deeper mysteries" also seems to be a denial of the influence on art by Africa, Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, the "third world" and all native peoples everywhere. Western technological society isn't everything.
What is the reality of art today? Of entertainment today? What should they be? What could they be?