« TT: Words to the wise | Main | TT: Call me accountable »
June 7, 2005
TT: Never enough
A reader writes:Have we run out of art? And do we really need any more of it? It's a question I've been thinking about a lot lately (and I'm sure you ask yourself that question on a daily basis). Have we painted all the paintings we need, recorded all the great music, taken all the great photographs, written all the great operas and ballets, etc.?
In other words, is the demand for new art diminishing--not because we are a soulless culture obsessed with celebrity and real estate--but because there's more than enough great stuff out there to consume, and we don't have nearly enough time to enjoy it? There seems to be such a glut of everything artistic these days. In jazz alone, I could go on listening to new and already-heard stuff from the same 1940s and 1950s period until I dropped dead at 100 without running out, and that's jazz alone. Meaning, I really don't need any more jazz to be produced. It's all on disc. I don't need any more cabaret singers singing Cole Porter, or young guys in suits playing Fats Navarro, etc.
Can one argue that we already have all the great works we need and that if the number of artists producing works is declining, the reason has more to do with the fact that artists have nothing more to say that hasn't been said already v. you can't make a living doing it?
Artists, don't fly off the handle. My correspondent (who is also a good friend) is raising a serious question, asked by a person who genuinely loves art but finds himself grappling with the vexing problem of how to allocate that most precious of all unrenewable resources: time.
Remember that no one, not even the wealthiest of connoisseurs, has an unlimited amount of time to spend on art. However wisely or unwisely we allocate them, there are only twenty-four hours in a day. Sooner or later, we have to choose. In order to write my weekly Wall Street Journal column, I see every play that comes to Broadway, and I also do my best to catch what I expect to be the most important off-Broadway and out-of-town openings. Yet even if I did nothing but go to plays, I still wouldn't be able to see all the shows that interested me. Factor in the additional time I spend looking at ballets, operas, and art exhibitions, listening to concerts, going to nightclubs, reading books...but you get the point, right? I make hard cultural choices every day, and the hardest of these is deciding how much of my inescapably limited free time to devote to seeking out new works of art.
When it comes to theater, of course, the choice is to some extent made for me. In a sense, every theatrical production is "new," even a revival of Hamlet. And while I suppose you could spend your whole playgoing life doing nothing but attending performances of the classics, that'd still leave you with plenty of nights off. Not so the other art forms, especially those that are physically embodied (like painting) or can be reproduced mechanically (like music). With them, you can spend your days living exclusively in the past, and it goes without saying, or should, that such an existence can be wholly fulfilling. If I had to spend the rest of my life with Rembrandt, Schubert, and Flannery O'Connor, who's to say it would somehow be less satisfactory than a life spent with Cy Twombly, Philip Glass, and Jane Smiley? Not me.
None of this, however, means that there is no case to be made for the new. On the contrary, one of the most important parts of my work as a critic is to make that case, to seek out exciting new works of art and write about them so evocatively that my readers feel moved to go out and experience them at first hand. I'm not talking about eat-your-spinach modern art, either. I don't like that any more than most people do. Late modernism in all its painfully earnest guises was a concerted assault on the sensibilities, one that persuaded a generation of unhappy audiences to shun the new--but those days, as the kids say, are soooo over. In the past year, I've written about such accessible, immediately involving new works of art as Jane Freilicher's My Cubism, Adam Guettel's The Light in the Piazza, Agnès Jaoui's Look at Me, Pat Metheny's The Way Up, Paul Moravec's Tempest Fantasy, Mark Morris' Rock of Ages, and Austin Pendleton's Orson's Shadow. The collective existence of works like these is the strongest possible argument against the mistaken notion that "artists have nothing more to say that hasn't been said already." Each of them has something fresh to say--not necessarily innovative, but new. And while you may not end up enjoying all of them, I can promise that each one will meet you halfway. You don't even have to seek them out: I've already done that. All you have to do is buy a ticket, then show up in an attentive frame of mind, open to the possibility of pleasure.
Aside from everything else, there's no substitute for the galvanizing experience of being present at the creation of a new work of art that might possibly end up being great. Nothing is so thrilling as making up your own mind instead of waiting for posterity to do it for you. Just as important, though, taking a chance on new art is the price we pay for a healthy culture, one in which talented artists don't have to wait on tables. Those who decline to pay it are the cultural equivalent of rentiers, aesthetic remittance men who live off the accumulated capital of the past without contributing anything of their own.
We can't all make art, but we can at least place a bet from time to time on those who dare to do so. No matter how busy you may be, I really don't think it's too much to ask.
Posted June 7, 2005 12:01 PM
