The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

The essay I wrote about the current cultural overemphasis on creativity-for-creativity-sake (which included a small jab at all the pointless blogs overrunning the internet), interestingly created a modest amount of buzz in the blogosphere. That is, the original version of the essay–published on mnartists.org–was linked to by dozens of bloggers. This is first time anything like this has happened to any of the 170 or so arts pieces I’ve published in the past ten years. Probably this is because the sentiments of the piece run so counter to our culture’s received wisdom, but it may also have something to do with the times (and the explosion in the number of blogs).

For samples of the blogoscussion on the Creativity that Kills, go here, here, or here. There seem to be three basic reactions to this essay’s ideas. The first, and surprisingly most common, is “Amen, brother!” The idea that there are too many creative people and too much cultural emphasis on creativity seems to have touched a nerve for a lot of people. Of course, the people are quick to cast fingers at everyone else–saying, “Yes, I wish all those other people would stop trying to make art!” But I suppose this is human nature (to blame others and avoid blaming oneself).

The second reaction is “That guy’s just bitter!” This may or may not be true, but it was not my intention to come across as someone whose view of art and artists is ruled by his bitterness. Instead, as I hope is becoming clear on the Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America, I intend to look at difficult or troubling aspects of the art world solely in the hopes that things will one day be better. In some ways, you could say I’m a hopeless optimist about art and its role in the culture. Still, I’ve taken this reader reaction (that I’m “just bitter”) to heart and have made revisions to the original essay.

The third reaction is “He may be right, but things are no different now than they’ve ever been; there’s always been a lot of bad art and very little good art.” I won’t go into all the reasons that I disagree with this, but I would like to point out that those who had this response said nothing in response to my essay’s description of how “creativity” is overmanifesting itself in the culture (and what this does to a potential art audience):

“…we’ve become so inundated with creativity–in weblogs dedicated to every petty interest and whim, in vanity websites created by people of not much interest, in random belly-gazing podcasts of the braindead, in home-edited YouTube snoozefests, in well-meaning “preprofessional” writing associations, in endless craft groups and quilting associations and art meet-ups, and so on and so on—that actual audiences for honest-to-goodness good art and real creativity and cultural production are driven into hiding. Isn’t it the supreme and telling irony that even as the cultural emphasis on creativity grows, the actual audience for art is shrinking in real numbers?”

One of the bloggers suggested my beef is with the entire Web 2.0 movement. As someone who’s used the web to expand my audience (through blogs, websites, and other such web services), I started to object to this, but then I read Andrew Keen’s anti-Web 2.0 screed, The Cult of the Amateur. Here’s his take on a similar problem (the loss of quality public discourse), which I think connects up well with my thoughts on creativity:

“We–those of us who want to know more about the world, those of us who are the consumers of mainstream culture–are being seduced by the empty promise of the “democratized” media. For the real consequences of the Web 2.0 revolution is less culture, less reliable news, and a chaos of information. One chilling reality in this brave new digital epooch is the blurring, obfuscation, and even disappearance of truth… The undermining of truth is threatening the quality of civil public discourse, encouraging plagiarism and intellectual property theft, and stifling creativity… Instead of more community, knowledge, or culture, all that Web 2.0 really delivvers is more dubious content from anonymous sources, hijacking our time and playing to our gullibility.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 1:10 pm and is filed under My published arts writing, Cult of creativity, Artistic failure in America, Other authors, Decline of art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.