Is Art Worth the Trouble?

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Yes—now more than ever.

Everyone knows that being an artist isn't easy. Some of the dilemmas committed creative people face are so familiar that they've become the staples of mythology and miniseries. The year-in, year-out struggle for recognition that may never come. The battle to make a living, which may entail either poverty or a demoralizing double life--stupid job in the daytime, a couple of hours of sleepy art time at night.

Then there are the problems that can't be solved even by a cushy academic gig, a MacArthur "genius" grant, or blockbuster success. Every artist has to fight the battle of invention--finding things to sculpt or write or dance about. This often means staying intimate day in and day out with personal pain, the world's suffering, and other stress inducers that the rest of us are happy to put away with a tall scotch or a course of therapy. The arts are so often lauded as "healing" that it's easy to forget that artists don't necessarily seek emotional "closure" in their work: they seek energy, fresh images, new experience, and if their personal bent requires them to keep searching for these things on the dark side of their personalities or the world, that's where they linger. The result can be anything from a vibrant, multifaceted life to madness and suicide.

AND HERE'S STILL ANOTHER PROBLEM (it's where you and I, the audience, come in). The artist is three things at once: an inquirer, a craftsperson, and a communicator. She works crazy hours at crazy intensity to investigate life, then create something that meets her own highest standards of beauty, depth, surprise, or novelty. At the same time, she needs the systems of exhibition (theaters, publishing houses, galleries, music clubs, etc.) that showcase her vision and achievement for our pleasure, accolades, disgust, or indifference.

The artist has to fascinate us by satisfying himself. If he shorts his own standards in favor of what he thinks will make us happy, he's a hack; if he ignores us, he's an ivory-tower-dwelling snob. It would be terrific if every artist, at every stage in his career, were so totally a representative human being that pleasing himself automatically pleased the rest of us; but often that can't be. Especially when he's trying to give birth to something new, he may not be able to handle either side of the equation to his satisfaction.

This isn't just tough on the artist; it's tough on us. Artists have all kinds of ways to set themselves apart so they can do their strange and difficult work well. They fiercely guard their privacy and their work time. They gather together at film festivals and writers' colonies, in art schools and coteries, for mutual encouragement. To the rest of us, it can seem that they've fenced themselves off into cushy little private preserves where they cultivate private languages and a poisonous sense of superiority.

There's some truth to this picture. The French symbolists and decadents of the latter 19th century pioneered an attitude toward this craftsman-versus-communicator paradox that put all the weight on the side of craft--art for art's sake, and damn the audience for bourgeois pigs. (This should not keep us, by the way, from reading the magical verse of symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé or the fabulously overripe prose of the great decadent J.K. Huysmans.) To visit many hip art spots today can be like entering a walk-in refrigerator: If you're not cool enough, you get a decidedly chilly reception. Mediocre artists have always taken advantage of the mystique of artistic exclusivity to hide out in cliques and feel superior to everybody. Add to this the impenetrable jargon of many critics, and the aura of big money that pervades major theaters, museums, cinematheques, and other arts institutions, and the arts can seem like a sort of gated community, forever excluding outsiders.

As annoying as artistic exclusivity can seem, the fact is that real artists, no less than scientists or religious leaders, need some distance from the day-to-day, a sophisticated group of colleagues for support and sharing ideas, and even a specialized language that helps them communicate efficiently and usefully with their peers. Most artists are not elitist wankers; they tend to be hardworking people of middle-class or blue-collar origin with moderate or less-than-moderate incomes. They have found ways--sensuous, concrete ways--to think through and explore issues that concern us all: what it means to be alive, what real joy is, what the world could be, where we fit in the cosmos. They want desperately to connect with each other and with us, but they do not wish to "dumb down" their search or what they find. And sometimes what they find--what they make--doesn't quite make sense, even to them.

To inspire us in understanding the world and experiencing life deeply, they need our help and, yes, our love. How can we give it to them, and help them in their quest?

We can begin by examining the double-edged idea of entertainment. My father, who was a theater director, loved the word and traced it back to its Latin roots: "holding together." What he meant by entertainment was the fascination with which a powerful performance of a play "holds" the audience, turning all the spectators into one large consciousness. In a wider sense, he meant the responsibility every artist has to connect with his audience--to reflect their hopes and desires, their dilemmas and needs, and to give them something wonderful to enjoy.

But our corporate system has put the idea of entertainment to a very different purpose: turning all the arts into commodities that are supposed to refresh and restore us during the periodic, strictly limited downtime that the modern work regime allows us. Nights, weekends, and drive time: Relax with classical music, refresh with a good play. Then back to the cubicle or the production line and "real" life. If we buy the idea of artists as Muzak makers or mental massage therapists, then of course we are going to be put out when they present us with something that makes demands upon us: adventurous music that sounds ugly or strange, a film that tells a weirdly fragmented story, art that doesn't "look like art." We're going to panic, accuse the artists of navel-gazing one more time, and run away.

But if we choose to see the arts as a great, interconnected set of questions about life, as the sensuous version of the search for life's meaning, as a quest for truth that happens to use sound, color, the dance of words, the movement of bodies--well, then, we will begin to let the arts into our entire selves, our entire lives. We will begin to realize that some questions can only be asked (and answered) in this way, beyond mere ideas. We will begin to realize that the exploration of art is a dialogue that demands attention and patience on our part; that we are not always supposed to "get" everything right away, but live with artworks and let them whisper their secrets to us gradually. And we will begin to see through the eyes of those who have given their lives to this strange and difficult quest. We will begin to become artists ourselves, and perhaps even produce works full of beauty, uncertainty, strangeness, even "difficulty."

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