On the Nurturing of Low-Grade Creativity
What I have to say will come as no surprise.
But it will probably offend many of you.*
These remarks are long overdue—they spring from having seen too many sow’s ears made out of sow’s ears. And too much motherly “support” for the arts that is fatal to authentic art-making. Supporting is condescending. In some cases it amounts to virtue signaling. E.g. I went to the Symphony so that I could say I went to the Symphony.
Being a critic, especially in a small community, is a thankless task. Everyone with a performance, or a concert, or an exhibit seeks critical approval. But few want to hear critical appraisal.
Pro tip: if you consistently tell the truth, if you’re fair in your evaluations, people will trust what you have to say. But if you always praise every performance, every dance recital, every plein air show, etc. etc. no one will trust you.
“But I read a rave review in the __________. ” Yes, but did you believe it? Rave reviews only have credibility if the critic doesn’t give everything a rave review.
I am invited to many openings
And rehearsals, performances, and events. It’s wonderful to be asked. I try to go to ones that my intuition tells me might offer surprise. Pieces that show skill, but even more; that trigger some new insight. Pieces made by artists who can shape a narrative, or produce an unexpected image that points and reveals beyond itself.
There’s always a place for enthusiastic amateurs, people who enjoy making decorative visual work or playing music and who are generous about sharing. Creative people abound where I live in Santa Cruz, and many are self-aware enough to know when the work deserves a professional showing or when it’s wiser to invite family and friends to come admire at a private venue. It takes major chutzpah to charge audiences $30 to see/hear your work. And so the work must be able to justify the ticket price and to bear scrutiny.
Mothers Love Everything
Consider this: My mother loves everything I do, even though as a painter herself she doesn’t mind chiming in with a few choice words about composition or color choices. But my mother is subjective. Mother’s love what their children do. Refrigerator doors display the evidence. A critic is not the artist’s mother.
Be a true friend
If supporting your friend’s artwork means never daring to say a critical word about their efforts, then you’re not only cheating your friend of expanding his/her horizons—you’re lowering the bar of quality for everyone, the insanely gifted as well as the up-and-comers. You’re proclaiming that whatever they do is good enough for you. You’re patronizing your friend. It’s true, you might bruise someone’s feelings by offering a critical comment. But to never risk hurting someone’s feelings is to stay safe and agreeable (and phony!). It’s throwing away the chance to have an authentic discussion, to engage in some nitty gritty about artistic intentions.
Hell yes it’s easier, and safer, to simply smile and tell your friend/acquaintance that their work is “interesting.” That you’re glad you came to see it.
We’ve all done that. In the long run, it’s a sign that you don’t expect much from that person.
True story
My mother’s friend Donna was a woman who made little animal figures out of (so help me) cookie dough mixed with some hardening agent. Donna gave all her close friends one of these little figures for Christmas gifts. My mother, a sweet woman without a single enemy in the world, always complimented Donna on her annual dough figurine. And sure enough, next year Donna gave my mother the exact same species of dough figure. This went on year after year.
My mother had encouraged her friend and she got what she deserved. A cabinet full of kitsch. [After Donna’s death, I opened my mother’s china cabinet, grabbed a half dozen of these misshapen monsters, and hurled them into the garbage.] And Donna, a woman who might have pushed herself to more adventurous results, stayed right where she was on the felt-and-sequin ladder of tackiness (where my late Auntie Da is the reigning matriarch.)
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking the creative urge. It’s a universal impulse, and it’s a lot healthier than vaping or using a leaf blower. It’s done for the sheer love of it. But you don’t ask a critic to come see your new macramé piece expecting a published review.
If you do expect some critical response to work you’ve presented in public, be prepared for honest feedback. Something along the lines of, “Have you considered casting a trained dancer in the role of the acrobat (rather than your arthritic father-in-law)?” or, “This seems like a terrific start to something. If you explore this style further, who knows where it will lead.”
Another pro-tip
As a longtime restaurant reviewer I learned to accentuate the positive. If the food was mediocre, I wrote about the decor. If the food was bad, I didn’t write about it at all. This is a small town.
I will never tell you I loved your work, if I didn’t. If I felt it was unclear, or naive, or cloying, or just plain silly, or that it had been done before many times (and better), I will strive to be polite and say nothing. Lying to someone doesn’t help them grow or introspect about what it is they’re trying to express. It simply perpetuates the ordinary, the easy, or the embarrassing. Or worse. It deludes a serious practitioner into self-satisfaction, rather than encouraging them to go further. We already have plenty of that. We each should be aiming for the stars. But you’ll never aim there if you are consistently told that you already *are* there.
Final pro-tip
Just because someone is a nice person and has put a lot of effort into a piece of work doesn’t make it good. Hard work doesn’t equal insight. Quantity does not equal quality. A critic who refuses to coo platitudes is actually encouraging artists to push further. Those who come out to support are like mothers showing up for their child’s recitals. They are doing their duty.
To unreflectively applaud everything is to fail the entire mission of artistic growth. Those who come out to support don’t engage with the work, or the artist. They neglect to educate themselves in the history or vocabulary that would help to stretch and strengthen their own insight into what the artist is doing. They stick to safe, feel-good categories. “I love your colors,” or worse. They simply walk through an exhibit, or sit for a concert, without bothering to assess or discuss what they’ve just seen and heard.
Don’t be that kind of art consumer. Ask more of yourself. And of the artist.
Stop supporting the arts. It’s condescending! Authentic art doesn’t need to be supported. Go because you expect to be excited, swept away, surprised, delighted, and impressed. To have a good time, not to be worn out by obligation.
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* This piece was prompted by my recent experience of an art “event” so utterly misguided, embarrassing, and narcissistic as to be almost beyond comprehension. Rather than ruin someone’s day, or indeed their art practice revival, I sat there and endured an hour I will never have back. The other observers were there to “support” the artist’s effort, which was not a pro bono affair. A hefty chunk of change was charged. I was appalled and insulted. Hence this post.
Food for thought: Does Patti Smith need your support? Or a concert by professional musicians? Or a play by Shakespeare? Would you go hear Jonathan Franzen read because you want to support him?
Before you know it the Kims, who’ll literally do anything to make money, manage to insinuate themselves into the heart of the Park’s splendid household. It is a symbiotic ecosystem made in the hellishly brilliant imagination of this director.
The house itself is a key player in what will reveal itself to be Bong’s sly-handed tale of social inequity. An architectural masterpiece (designed by director Bong and made especially for the film) the sleek modernist house is laid out in interlocking levels. The living room’s enormous wall of glass overlooks an oasis of green lawn bordered by a manicured hedge. 
This hermetic world insulates the Parks from any unsightly social reality and makes a painful contrast to the mess and chaos of the Kim’s basement apartment. Most importantly to the director’s storytelling, the house also contains a secret passage into yet another domain—and a ghastly secret buried deep within the heart of lavish wealth.
And once the shocking visual pyrotechnics have cooled down, the film draws to a haunting, eloquent close a la Charles Dickens. Desperate and ephemeral dreams, of the sort that reveal how much the rich and the poor are mutually bound in a slow dance of need, greed, hypocrisy, and desire.
On the adjacent wall, Viola’s larger-than-lifesize figures strain against time and space in hyper slow motion, re-imagining the meeting (the piece is called The Greeting) among Mary, Elizabeth, and a third woman. Gracefully surging skirts, arms reaching out, hands about to clasp, faces registering surprise, delight, and puzzlement, Viola’s work—which takes time to unfold— forces us deep into and beneath the minds of his subjects.
The slowed-down movements and gestures cast digital congianti onto the image painted by Bronzino’s teacher in the early 16th century. Movement inflects stillness with layers of temporal depth. Absolutely stunning. Viola’s forensic probing of an emotion-drenched moment retrieves fresh sensations we can almost taste.
The Pontormo is triumphant, its colors brilliant as if freshly painted. A commanding palette of draped robes challenges the crimson dress worn Viola’s Mary, the magenta shawl of Elizabeth.The two works now share a secret, at once timeless and yet produced across and through time; they murmur of the same epic event. They are in league with each other. Sono insieme.
So it was with great anticipation that I took a break from operas in Vienna last month, hopped a plane across the alps, and headed for the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. Curated with insight and largesse by Viola’s longtime collaborator and wife Kira Perov, with Arturo Galansino, the retrospective—Electronic Renaissance—honors the years Viola spent as a student and pioneer videographer in Florence. Indeed, the city opened its doors to Viola’s work, displaying pieces in multiiple sites from the Museo del Duomo to the entire Palazzo Strozzi.
Like many of you, I had seen several of Viola’s pieces years ago at The Getty, and was familiar with his technique of hyper attenuated movement. The smallest blink of an eye, or grasp of a hand—actually happening in seconds—is stretched and lengthened into many minutes. The gestures seems to develop and bloom as we watch. Time itself unfolds through Viola’s unblinking camera, and an unseen symbolic power is revealed.
The Emergence, based upon an enigmatic and solumn 15th century work by Masolino is the exhibition’s signature work, and one in which Viola documents the naked Christ figure, emerging (as in a resurrection) and also ascending from a watery death, tenderly wrapped by two women (his mother Mary and the Magdalen, as the new testament tells it).
Displaying over a period of 15 minutes, the work uses its fascinating beauty (we are always wondering how it was made, noticing the arduousness of the actors’ movements) to enunciate a mysterious truth. We are watching a familiar moment, a primal moment we know in our bodies. Yet that moment has no name. It is deeper than naming. Viola knows that. The piece is nothing short of profound, kept watch over by the original Masolino alterpiece.
Dinner of pappardelle and wild boar ragu, chased with Chianti Classico. Next morning I saw more Viola pieces at the Museo del Opera del Duomo, and was ensnared in the tragic mirroring of Donatello‘s carved wood Magdalen—a work of numbing sorrow with Viola’s Acceptance—a lifesize video of a wailing nude woman inundated with torrents of water. The carved wooden animal hides covering the Magdalen were exactly echoed by the roiling flood, a stream of slow-motion tears. Stunned, I headed back for a second viewing of the Palazzo Strozzi show. Ten dollars was never better spent.
And here I walked into my own epiphany. I moved from darkened room to darkened room on Viola’s shamanic journey. The exhibition had cast a hypnotic spell, into which I, the seeker, descended deeper and deeper until I came to the room with a piece I had known about for many years—Catherine’s Room. Five panels showing the stages of a life, the time of life (youth, middle-age, etc.) symbolized by the view of a tree outside Catherin’e window. In her youth, the tree is beginning to bloom. As she grows into maturity, the tree is seen awash with green leaves, the sun high in the sky. As she grows older, the sky outside grows darker, the tree’s leaves fall. In the final panel, we watch as she makes her bed and lies down in it pulling up the covers. The window is dark, night has fallen.
Each panel is also a video piece, so we can watch each image unfold in slow-motion time. And we can take it all in at once, embrace the entire polyptych as a whole.
The Other Place vs Home. Each has exactly what the other lacks. The foreign city has architecture, history, and the cultural depth that only a critical mass of people, talent, and creative pressure can create. [It might also offer the spectacle of Korean newlyweds posing for nuptial photos with the Uffizi in the background.]
   The small seaside town has coziness, hominess, familiarity. Its smaller size allows for intimacy, a sense of geographical mastery that comes with manageable scale. And it is home, a place one has lived in for years. It contains friends, lovers, colleagues—all those whose ideas and eccentricities help construct your own life.
The smell of frankincense that fills the high altar of a cathedral on Sunday mornings speaks to my subconscious DNA. Was I a priest in a past life? The sound of church bells, counting out the hours, calling people to prayer, announcing this or another civic event, is part of the atmospheric soundtrack of European cities. A soundtrack missing from seaside California.
Without question we see ourselves and our cultural assumptions more clearly from afar. Travel removes me from work. I leave my laptop at home. I am frugal with my emails. Here and now details tend to define each day. I visit a museum in Florence and find it filled with engaged high school groups. I visit a Monet show in San Francisco and find it filled with white-haired nostalgics. The youthful energy and passion for the arts in Europe is both encouraging (I envy the Europeans) and sad (I am brusquely reminded of the inattention to art of the past by student-aged Americans). Yes, opera is expensive, but the queue for cheap standing room is a block-long in Vienna. All young people. Outside the US, museum tickets are inexpensive and everyone seems to take advantage of the sensory feast and stimulus to the imagination provided by innovatively-curated exhibitions. And no, I don’t mean simply parading out the content of a wealthy woman’s closet and calling it an art exhibition.
Nothing feels better than coming home after a stretch of time in which each day has required strategizing over where you will eat, whether your grasp of German and Italian (or whatever non-native language) will suffice without causing howls of derision, walking until your feet scream, struggling with jet lag, and dining with strangers or alone with only your cell phone (or a book!) for company. Being at home means never having to say “come se dice “clueless” in Italiano.” Being at home means not having to endure the specific humiliation of being handed a menu in English when you’ve worked your butt off to master restaurant German. Being at home means not having to negotiate hieroglyphic subway signage, taxi prices, the ridiculously small size of street names on maps that you’re trying not to be seen using.
But as Sartre liked to remind us, nothing makes us feel as alive as struggle. Nor does the successful result leave as lasting an impact as when we had to work for it. Adversity is bracing. And that sense of quest, of having to work for the cold beer at the top of the hill, or that first glimpse of the Duomo after a 12-hour plane trip—these are what sweeten both the present moment, and that lasting memory of travel.
And then there’s the slammed against the wall discomfort and disarray of long-distance travel. The customs lines, the dishevelment of TSA, the spatial cram and compromise of airplane seating, the out-of-body haze of having been semi-conscious for 20 hours and then having to check into a hotel with something close to dignity. [A sidebar you’ll enjoy: as my Slovakian cabbie approached the inner city of Vienna, he was stopped at the bridge over the Donau canal. According to the polizei, all roads to the old city were closed. It was a Friday, the end of April. No explanations. My poor driver was apologetic but he had to let me out right there, with only a few indications of where I should go—straight ahead, turn right, then another left to my hotel. This is after SFO to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Vienna, 15 hours of travel and loaded down with one huge rolling suitcase and another carry-on case. I had to actually roll both cases through the streets of Vienna, ask for directions twice, then go the long way through throngs of student tour groups and people with selfie sticks all clustered around the huge cathedral, just attempting to stay on my feet. Arms aching, utterly wiped out, I made it to my hotel. Not my best travel memory.]
There’s more to ponder here. Once jetlag and the utter exhaustion of the long flight wore off, I began to walk the streets, learn where my favorite new cafes were, meet up with fellow opera-lovers for the many evenings of great music, revisit museums I hadn’t seen since grad school. In other words, I began residency in a new world. I had carved out yet another life, a new identity in which I was psychologically at least in two places at once.
Travel gives us not only new spaces, it gives us more time. And the illusion of an expanded life. I can live in two places at once. At least for a while—as long as my feet (and my money) hold out.