The media make a potentially fatal mistake by dividing arts coverage into high and low, old and young, and by trivializing our passionate attraction to things. In Out There I propose that all creative expression has the potential to be both thought-provoking and popular; to write about flea markets as if they were museums (and vice versa); to celebrate singers and chefs.
\nA short example:<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nWhy should I, or anyone, have been surprised that a few years back, Yoko Ono was number one on the dance-club charts — with a gay redo of her and John’s Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him<\/em>? It was a nice story: a young friend had told Yoko that his once-hip mom cited those old lyrics when the boy came out to her, so Yoko gave him some post-hip ammunition (Every Man Has a Man…<\/em>) to sing back.\n<\/p>\n \nSome of us think of Yoko Ono primarily as a talented, well-funded Fluxus artist; some as an avant-garde screecher; some as a mythic has-been, the demon who broke up the Beatles. How can any cultural critic know exactly which reader, listener or viewer is out there? Pleasing a shape-shifting audience would seem to be impossible, especially when the culture also won’t hold still.\n<\/p>\n \nDuring most of my professional life I’ve been a citizen of two different worlds: the fine and the popular arts. When I was a restaurant critic, many of my arts friends teased me about my frivolous hobby (though no one refused a dinner out). My food friends couldn’t fathom why I’d occasionally speed up a meal to go to a gallery opening or make a curtain. The two camps were baffled equally by my lifelong attraction to barrel-bottom TV, tear-churning beach reads, coming-out potboilers: cultural junk food. And real junk food, too.\n<\/p>\n \nPleasure, I told them, was my reason. Material pleasure, I discovered, is never entirely physical: it always latches on to emotions, memories, ideas. And the pleasure of thought is never entirely cerebral: it invariably comes with heart and skin attached.\n<\/p>\n \nSo that’s my starting point. Did I mention that I love stories, and TV remains our narrative cornucopia? That eating is culture? That I’m a gay man who has no trouble getting angry about what is — and isn’t — out there?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The media make a potentially fatal mistake by dividing arts coverage into high and low, old and young, and by trivializing our passionate attraction to things. In Out There I propose that all creative expression has the potential to be both thought-provoking and popular; to write about flea markets as if they were museums (and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-24","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-about","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}